Supporters of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange have claimed responsibility for taking down major websites Friday with a DDoS attack on Global internet routing company Dyn. The attack was allegedly a response to Ecuador’s decision to cut off Assange’s internet access.
“Hacktivist groups Anonymous and New World Friday afternoon said they were behind the digital siege, indicating it was retaliation for the Ecuadorian government’s decision to cut off internet access for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over his site’s ongoing leaks of alleged internal documents from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign,” Tony Romm and Eric Geller report for Politico. “‘The specific target is anything big,’ a New World Hackers representative using the alias Prophet said in a text message exchange with POLITICO. ‘We were testing our power at first.’”
“However, digital security researchers and U.S. officials preached caution, arguing there is still scant evidence to determine who is behind the attack, warning that both groups have falsely taken credit for high-profile attacks in the past,” Romm and Geller report. “The outages affected internet users across the U.S., and caused hundreds of sites to be inaccessible both early in the morning on the East Coast, again around midday and then again after 4 p.m. EST.”
“WikiLeaks’ latest release — a dump of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s alleged personal emails — drove the Ecuadorian government to ax Julian Assange’s internet last weekend. The activist has been living in Ecuador’s London embassy since the country granted him diplomatic asylum in 2012,” Romm and Geller report. “Prophet insisted the attacks Friday had nothing to do with the U.S. election, and that it was working with Anonymous to protest Assange’s loss of internet access. ‘We don’t plan to do anything with the U.S. election, it’s not for us,’ Prophet said. WikiLeaks late Friday called on hackers to halt the digital onslaught.”
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