It seems that Anonymous has suffered its first casualty in their cyber war on Wikileaks detractors. In the Netherlands, a 16 year old boy has been arrested for contributing to the Distributed Denial of Service attack on MasterCard that Anonymous has claimed responsibility for. According to NOS, the boy confessed to police last night that he was a part of the attack. The Dutch National crime Squad was investigating the DDoS attack after it occurred, and tracked some of the activity to a server in Haarlem.
The attack originated after Wikileaks, and its now imprisoned leader Julian Assange, came under international fire from many world leaders and organizations for their release of countless classified international diplomatic cables. Today is the second day of the attack from Anonymous, and the DDoSers don’t seem to be giving up.
While the attackers were successful in knocking out MasterCard and Visa"s websites briefly, some within the organization were suggesting they try to go after Amazon.com. However, after the apparent failure to bring down Paypal in an meaningful way, the previously controlled anarchy is fragmenting and losing focus, disagreeing on what to attack and when. Many see Amazon as too big of a fish to fry, and would rather stick with known vulnerable targets, like MasterCard.
Companies like Prolexic, who specialize is anti-DDoS services, have already signed up financial transaction processing services like Authorize.net to help protect against a possible DDoS attack from Anonymous. As day 2 of the attack proceeds, we will update this post with breaking news from the front.
We are also live-blogging via our Twitter account as details arise. Follow us there for updates as they happen.