Attacks against MasterCard by Wikileaks supporters who knocked on the Web the company credit card offline now the site may have caused more problems than previously thought.
MasterCard itself has so far only said publicly that the company's Web site has experienced problems due to the availability of ongoing distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) attack against the site. In a statement this afternoon, the company said it was making progress to address the issue and that no customer transactions were affected.
now appears that the service company Securecode to ensure the security of online transactions are also affected. It is not clear, however, if the problem is caused by anonymous SecureCode, a group that hit offline MasterCard corporate site after the attack began around 4:00 p.m. EST.
In a bulletin of several transaction processing business, the company said that MasterCard and Maestro transactions are not processed by the disruption caused by MasterCard SecureCode Directory Server.
The server has since failed to secondary sites, but customers could still experience intermittent connectivity problems, MasterCard said. It does not offer a timetable for the moment hope to restore full service.
A spokeswoman for MasterCard SecureCode confirmed the disruption of services, but insisted that online transactions were not affected. Conversely, there are "isolated cases" of slowdowns SecureCode were reported, he said, adding that the SecureCode service was restored to normal.
Meanwhile, rival Visa MasterCard, which is also subject to DDoS attacks, finally knocked offline this afternoon. Visa corporate main site seems to have been hit by two separate attacks by Sean Paul Correll, a researcher PandaLabs. Correll has been maintaining a blog that is updated regularly on the attack.
The first attack against the site began last night after midnight ET and caused intermittent outages for several hours. No group has claimed responsibility for attacks, "said Correll.
Then around 4:00 ET today, the company has been hit by a DDoS attack - this time by Anonymous, a group loosely affiliated hackers who have vowed to attack the organization views as an attempt to censor Wikileaks.
In a statement, Visa said the company's Web site Visa.com is "currently experiencing heavier than normal traffic" and said he hoped to restore full operation of the site in the coming hours. "The processing of Visa network, which handles transactions for a cardholder, is operating normally and the cardholder can continue to use their cards because they are systematically accounts data. No risk."
Anonymous, who also attacked the entertainment industry sites on the implementation issues of copyright, this week launched Operation: Assange retaliation. It is intended to "entities involved in the censorship of information [Wikileaks']."
So far, the group is supposed to be behind attacks against MasterCard, Visa, Swiss PostFinance payment transaction company, PayPal, and other EveryDNS. All targets recently announced its intention to terminate services after the site Wikileaks began releasing confidential State Department cable.
In addition to these attacks, Anonymous has also launched a Web site attacks Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and the website of the Swedish Ministry of rape charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
