It’s hard to keep WikiLeaks down; following the massive sustained DDoS attack by a group known as AntiLeaks, the Julian Assange’s whistleblower website is back in action.
The attacks started last week, with a group of self-described ‘young adults, citizens of the United States of America,’ creating widespread speculation that the US government was actually behind the DDoS. At one point, Wikileaks said that they were getting as much as 40 gigabytes of traffic every second, which is more than enough to paralyze anyone’s server, but the attack appears to have died down for the time being.
The attacks coincided with the release of documents involving TrapWire, a secret surveillance program that apparently ties together surveillance cameras across the world, linking them with facial recognition software and AI to spot ‘suspicious’ activity. Some messages even mentioned using the system against activists at landmarks.
Of course, we’ll probably never know if the US government was really involved in the attack (unless something concerning it gets leaked, of course). WikiLeaks has generated a lot of enemies in its brief lifetime, and the government is hardly the only entity that would like to see it go away.
Source: BBC