http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2010/11/30/wikileaks-hit-by-powerful-cyber-attack/NEW YORK (CBS/AP) – The WikiLeaks website says it’s under a forceful Internet-based attack, and content on the site was inaccessible to some users in the U.S. and Europe throughout the morning Tuesday.
The site, which just distributed a trove of U.S. diplomatic documents, said in a Twitter message on Tuesday morning that it’s under a “distributed denial of service attack,” a method commonly used by hackers to slow down or bring down sites.
“We are currently under a DDOS attack,” according to one tweet early Tuesday. Shortly after 9 a.m., another tweet was sent, saying, “DDOS attack now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second.”
The site was under attack Sunday, but Tuesday’s attack appears to be more powerful. WikiLeaks said the malicious traffic was coming in at 10 gigabits per second, which would make it a relatively large effort.
The WikiLeaks site is hosted in Sweden and devoted to releasing anonymously submitted documents.
