‘Operation Payback’ continues, Visa site offline

The “group of hackers” responsible for taking Mastercard’s main site offline for hours today (a basic version of the site appears to be back up for now) has successfully disrupted service on Visa’s website as well after an open call was made on Twitter for supporters of freedom of speech on the internet to launch a DDOS attack.

About two hours ago, an account on Twitter used to organize the attacks (Anon_Operation) sent the following tweet to followers:

TARGET: WWW.VISA.COM :: FIRE FIRE FIRE!!! WEAPONShttp://bit.ly/e6iR3X ::: SET YOUR LOIC TO irc.anonops.net :::#DDOS #PAYBACK #WIKILEAKS

Quickly following up with:

http://isitup.org/www.visa.com IT’S DOWN! KEEP FIRING!!!#DDOS #PAYBACK #WIKILEAKS

Just minutes ago, the account also re-tweeted the following message:

verified.visa.com is a better target, take that out and ecommerce transactions will grind to a halt!

As of now, Visa has been down since the call was issued on Twitter, and the company has not addressed the outage. Earlier, Mastercard tried to pass off the outage as due to “heavy traffic on its external corporate website.”

UPDATE: As of 6:08 EST, @Anon_Operation has been suspended.