World News Australia - Visa cyber-attacked to 'avenge' WikiLeaks
The website of credit card giant Visa was intermittently unavailable after a cyber attack by members of the hackers group "Anonymous" angered by its blocking of payments to WikiLeaks.
Visa.com went down instantaneously at 4:00 pm (2100 GMT) as members of Anonymous launched a coordinated cyber attack announced on their Twitter feed @Anon_Operation.
"Operation Payback. TARGET: WWW.VISA.COM :: FIRE FIRE FIRE!!! WEAPONS," the message said.
Members of "Anonymous," in an online chat with AFP on Wednesday, vowed to extend their cyber campaign to anyone with an "anti-WikiLeaks agenda."
The group has already taken credit for temporarily taking down the websites of Mastercard, PayPal, the Swiss Post Office bank and others with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
In a typical DDoS attack, a large number of computers are commanded to simultaneously visit a website, overwhelming its servers, slowing service or knocking it offline completely.
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