Although topics related to Wikileaks and Julian Assange have been mysteriously not trending on Twitter the last few days (prompting many Twitter users to grumble about censorship), early this morning “Mastercard” briefly was a trending topic on the site due to an ongoing distributed denial of service attack on the credit card behemoth.
As of now, Mastercard’s site remains inaccessible and times out when opened. The first tweet announcing a successful DDOS came very early this morning- about four hours ago, per Twitter:
‘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
Mastercard offered a brief statement on the global outage, carefully sidestepping any mention of an attack:
MasterCard is experiencing heavy traffic on its external corporate website – MasterCard.com. We are working to restore normal speed of service.
There is no impact whatsoever on our cardholders ability to use their cards for secure transactions.
Amazon, Paypal and Visa have all been floated as upcoming targets for their lack of support for Wikileaks, as well as Twitter for what some users see as a deliberate suppression of the #Wikileaks hashtag. No word from Mastercard on when they expect to recover from the attack.
