Rob Cotton, chief executive, NCC Group plc, comments on the denial of service attacks impacting MasterCard and PayPal:
“This coordinated backlash from WikiLeaks supporters group ,‘Anonymous’, charts the growing use of cyber attacks as a weapon to make political statements by attempting to embarrass large organisations. However, these are more commonly seen against political groups or government websites, rather than blue chip companies.
“In canceling their contracts with WikiLeaks through political pressure, these companies have become the targets of hacktivism – one of the fastest growing uses for cyber crime. Others that have cancelled contracts or severed ties with WikiLeaks would do well to review the robustness of their websites and review their security strategies as quickly as possible.
“The distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) used by the ‘Anonymous’ group inundate websites with user page requests so that the targets become unable to handle the load, and crash as a result. The hackers are distributing further links to its network to further strengthen the attack through more page requests.
“DDoS attacks are extremely difficult to combat. However, in this case, the group has indicated that the attack is intended to force the companies into spending more on website load provision rather than crash the sites.”