Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Hackers hit Mastercard and Visa over Wikileaks row - BBC News




Hackers have attacked the websites of credit card giants Mastercard and Visa.
The attacks came after the Anonymous group of hackers pledged to pursue firms that have withdrawn services from Wikileaks.

Mastercard payments were disrupted but the firm said there was "no impact" on people's ability to use their cards.

Visa's website also experienced problems. The attacks came after both companies stopped processing payments to the whistle-blowing site.

Entries on the Twitter page of Operation Payback, the Anonymous campaign, said the Visa site had been taken down.

Visa's website was later restored and spokesman Ted Carr said its processing network, which handles cardholder transactions, was working normally.

But in a day of fast-moving developments, the Anonymous Twitter page then went down, replaced by a message from Twitter saying the account had been suspended.

Twitter say they do not comment on "the actions we take on specific user accounts". However, a source told the BBC that the last tweet sent out by Anonymous included a link to a file containing consumer credit card information.

Paul Mutton at the security firm Netcraft, who is monitoring the attacks, said Visa is considered a more difficult target and the attack on it required a much larger number of "hacktivist" - politically motivated hackers - 2,000 compared with 400 for Mastercard.


Get the full report at:

Hackers hit Mastercard and Visa over Wikileaks row

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