Via Ancaps: Has WikiLeaks landed in cyberattack crosshairs?

Forget China or Al Qaeda. In a twist that would have been inconceivable even a few months ago, the WikiLeaks.org Web site is being proposed as the first public target for a U.S. government cyberattack.After the shadowy, document-leaking organization distributed nearly 400,000 classified documents from the Iraq war on Friday, Washington officialdom responded with a torrent of denunciations alleging violations of national security and endangering U.S. military operations.In a rare point of congruence, The Washington Post and The Washington Times both criticized the release, with the smaller paper arguing that WikiLeaks' offshore Web site should be attacked and rendered "inoperable" by the U.S. government. Some hawkish conservatives followed suit, including Christian Whiton, a State Department adviser under President George W. Bush, who wrote a column calling on the U.S. military to "electronically assault WikiLeaks and any telecommunications company offering its services to this organization."
Their target's actually not that far away. WikiLeaks' Web site is now hosted on Amazon.com servers on United States soil near San Jose, Calif.The tech-savvy activists are taking advantages of the popular Amazon Web Services platform, described as offering "massive compute capacity and storage" that is automatically ramped up as more and more people connect to a Web site--a perfect fit for a group that had anticipated a deluge of traffic.
To be precise, the WikiLeaks.org domain name has been configured to point to three different Internet Protocol (IP) addresses: Amazon in the United States, Amazon in Ireland, and an address owned by Octopuce in France. Octopuce provides hosting for free-software enthusiasts and France's Big Brother Awards. (Netcraft'stoolbar explains the situation well.)An Amazon spokeswoman contacted yesterday morning did not respond to multiple inquiries. A Pentagon representative said yesterday he had no immediate response, and Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said only: "We continue to assist the Defense Department in its investigation into the leak of classified information to WikiLeaks."To be sure, calls for the forcible muzzling of WikiLeaks also happened in July, when WikiLeaks posted secret military dispatches from the Afghanistan war. Conservative commentator Liz Cheney, for instance, said: "I would really like to see President Obama move to ask the government of Iceland to shut that Web site down. I'd like to see him move to shut it down ourselves if Iceland won't do it." At the time,

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Via Ancaps: Has WikiLeaks landed in cyberattack crosshairs?

Via Ancaps: Has WikiLeaks landed in cyberattack crosshairs?

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