Hackers Crash Mastercard Site, Claim Cyberwar

WikiLeaks has hailed a ‘cyberwar' after hackers have illegally brought down Mastercard's official website mastercard.com, after the credit card company stopped donations going to the whistle-blowing website.

The hackers, dubbing themselves Anonymous, launched ‘Operation: Payback' following Mastercard's halting of donations by overloading the Mastercard website, making it unavailable at around lunchtime (and still unavailable at the time of writing).

A message on Twitter from @Anon_Operation, read: 'WE ARE GLAD TO TELL YOU THAT http://www.mastercard.com/ is DOWN AND IT'S CONFIRMED! '#ddos #wikileaks Operation:Payback(is a b****!) #PAYBACK'

Another, from AnonyWatcher, added - in a play on MasterCard's advertising: 'There are some things Wikileaks can't do. For everything else, there's Operation Payback.'

WikiLeaks Europe - also on Twitter - declared it was 'cyberwar'. The organisation said: 'Group That Took Down Swiss Bank Site Have Now Taken Down Mastercard.com.'

Mastercard said Monday that it was blocking payments because WikiLeaks was engaging in illegal activity, and soon after Visa followed suit as did other US organisations embarrassed by the site continues to embarrass the US political elite by publishing leaked diplomatic cables.

In a statement today, Mastercard confirmed it is "experiencing heavy traffic on its external corporate website" but claims it "remains accessible" and that "there is no impact whatsoever on our cardholders' ability to use their card for secure transactions."

The boycott has angered DataCell, the Iceland-based firm that enables Wikileaks to accept card payments. In a statement, DataCell CEO Andreas Fink confirmed that DataCell has "decided to take up immediate legal actions to make donations possible again."

Fink goes on: "The suspension of payments towards Wikileaks is a violation of the agreements with their customers. Visa users have explicitly expressed their will to send their donations to Wikileaks and Visa is not fulfilling this wish. It will probably hurt their brand much much more to block payments towards Wikileaks than to have them occur. Visa customers are contacting us in masses to confirm that they really donate and they are not happy about Visa rejecting them. It is obvious that Visa is under political pressure to close us down."

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