Operation Payback struck as recently as Monday evening, when Swiss bank PostFinance was reportedly hacked by the group in response to the bank’s freezing of Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange’s legal defense fund amounting to $41,000. A hacker known only as The Jester (th3j35t3r), part of a hacker group known as Anonymous, is believed to be responsible for a December 5 take down of the PayPal web site blog.
A movement of anonymous hackers and hack groups dubbed Operation Payback has released a video statement threatening cyber attacks against internet censorship.
According to the statement, they are over 9000 strong and they will take actions against internet content censorship. “Expect us,” the group threatened. Such attacks would include action against those who are used to “outsource” work.
Governments, Industry Take Action Against Wikileaks
Wikileaks recently released over 250,000 confidential and secret US State department documents, raising geopolitical tensions and bringing calls for censorship, arrest and assassination against the web site’s founder Julian Assange. In response to pressure from the US government and others, Amazon.com was the first to take serious action against Assange by cutting off Wikileaks’ DNS servers. Though the web site came back up via other means, numerous attacks have been launched using a technique called DOS, or Denial of Service, to overwhelm the web site servers that mirror the content, causing access errors.
The web site was replicated hundreds of times by independent publishers, making it almost impossible to completely shut down access to the leaked documents and videos.
As recently as Monday night, a new effort to cut off Wikileaks’ multiple funding mechanisms seemed to be under way. Mastercard issued a statement saying that it was “taking action to ensure that WikiLeaks can no longer accept MasterCard-branded products.” This comes after Paypal, one of the largest transaction processors in the world, terminated Wikileaks’ account making it much more difficult for the site to acquire funding for operations and litigation. Wikileaks had received donations via paypal payments for years before the recent shutdown due to terms of service violations.
Operation Payback Attacks Swiss Bank In Response to Wikileaks Funding Freeze
In response to what it calls an infringement of human rights, the group says that unjust restrictions imposed on the internet will meet with disaster, and only strengthen their resolve to disobey and rebel against tyranny.
Operation Payback struck as recently as Monday evening, when Swiss bank PostFinance was reportedly hacked by the group in response to the bank’s freezing of Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange’s legal defense fund amounting to $41,000. A hacker known only as The Jester (th3j35t3r), part of a hacker group known as Anonymous, is believed to be responsible for a December 5 take down of the PayPal web site blog. The Jester later tweeted “TANGO DOWN — thepaypalblog.com — Blog of Paypal, company that has restricted Wikileaks’ access to funding.”
“Such actions taken against you,” Operation Payback warns those who would censor or enable censorship of internet content, “are inevitable, unavoidable, and unstoppable.”
The group says their chief complaint is that measures such as those taken by parties against Wikileaks would restrict peoples’ access to the internet. “In these modern times, access to the internet is fast becoming a basic human right,” the group said in their video press release. “Just like any other basic human right, we believe it is wrong to infringe on it.”
