Anyone who has been following the whole Wikileaks story will know the organization is facing an incredible adversary who has no compunction in using whatever means possible to shut Wikileaks down. That doesn’t mean that Wikileaks isn’t without its defenders as we are hearing of mirrors for the Wikileaks files showing up around the world on thousands of web connected computers, hell you can even create a mirror on your android device .
While much of this defense of Wikileaks is of the passive nature there is one group at least that is going on the offensive by attacking the companies that have tried to cut Wikileaks off at the knees. These companies range from Amazon (even though they’re still willing to host Kindle versions of the files) to Visa, Mastercard and PayPal.
Chief among these shadowy groups is one known as Anonymous and it is this group that has been leading the charge to bring the opposing companies like PayPal to their knees. Now for the most part this is done through what is called Distributed Denial of Service , or DDoS, which means that the target company has their networks literally flooded with massive amounts of data which leads to their networks crashing.
Generally these attacks are taken against the public facing sites which makes the sites inaccessible for varying periods of time but as effective as that might be it is only short term and really has very little effect beyond the buzz it creates. However these groups are filled with some really smart and tech savvy people and it was inevitable that they would figure out a better method of attack – the money pipeline.
Over the past couple of years we have seen one thing become a backbone of the Web and the services that communicate with each other and the consumer. Whether it be personal data or consumers buying products all this data is going through a type of pipeline called APIs (application programming interface) and they are akin in a lot of ways to being a nervous system of the Web.
Well it appears, according to a post by Brad McCarty at The Next Web , that Anonymous have figured out that attacking the endpoints of these could have a much more drastic effect on their target companies than any other kind of DDoS and are using this method against PayPal.
It is one thing to figuratively splash paint on a corporate headquarters which is really what much of the typical DDoS attacks are like but it is another thing entirely to target the very lifeblood of a company – their financial transaction pipeline. This of course is exactly what the PayPal API is – their lifeblood between them and the consumer.
What this does though, especially if successful over an extended period of time, is how that those APIs that an increasing number of companies are integrating into their system is potentially a major weak point. A weak point that when attacked in the manner that Anonymous is attacking PayPal could have disastrous affect on the entire web.
twitter image courtesy of The Next Web
