WikiLeaks says website under new cyber attack

WikiLeaks said in a Twitter message Tuesday that it was under a new cyber attack after a similar incident at the weekend just before the website began releasing secret US diplomatic cables.

"We are currently under another DDoS attack," WikiLeaks said on its official Twitter feed.

DDoS stands for distributed denial of service. Classic DDoS attacks occur when legions of "zombie" computers, normally machines infected with viruses, are commanded to simultaneously visit a website.

Such a massive onslaught can overwhelm servers, slowing service or knocking them offline completely.

A later message on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed said "DDoS attack now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second."

Jon Karlung, chairman of the Swedish firm Bahnhof which hosts some of WikiLeaks including documents on the Iraq War, confirmed that there was an attack, but the primary target was not its servers in Stockholm.

"We don't have the primary cable logs (the diplomatic leaks), we don't host that. But we can see that there is an attack, we can't see very much but we can see that their servers are very slow," he said.

Karlung said that WikiLeaks was primarily hosted by U.S. online retailer Amazon, at an address in Seattle.

"An American company is hosting WikiLeaks, that's fairly remarkable," said Karlung, adding that WikiLeaks had in recent weeks used France-based servers.
Amazon is a major provider of Web-hosting services, renting out space on its computer servers to customers around the world.
WikiLeaks is reportedly being hosted on Amazon's "cloud," or Internet-based platform, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, known as Amazon EC2.

On Sunday, just as it began the release of some 250,000 U.S. embassy cables, WikiLeaks said on Twitter the website had come under a DDoS cyber attack.

But it insisted El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and the New York Times would go ahead with the publication of the first of such documents even if the WikiLeaks website was down.

WikiLeaks later circumvented the attack by creating a sub-website as its main website became inaccessible after the attack.

Limited access to database

The U.S. State Department has limited the Pentagon's access to one of its databases as part of efforts to prevent another mass leak of diplomatic cables, officials said.

The move comes just over nine years after the September 11, 2001 attacks prompted a greater sharing of information among government agencies as a defense against future terrorist strikes.

But the State Department said it was temporary.

"We have temporarily severed the connection between this database and one classified network," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters.

"We have made these adjustments in the last week," he said.

Crowley said the database was one with a large array of diplomatic cables but declined to identify the classified network.

However, a senior State Department official told reporters later that the network was the military's classified SIPRNet, or Secret Internet Protocol Router Network.

WikiLeaks has never revealed its source.

But suspicion has focused on a U.S. Army private working in military intelligence, Bradley Manning, who is now in detention.

Given Manning's low rank, the Pentagon has faced questions over how it handles security clearances and secret information.

Colonel Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said Monday that the Defense Department had tightened procedures for handling sensitive information but he did not expect changes to rules on who is permitted access to secret documents.

The Defense Department on Sunday announced a series of measures to crack down on potential leaks, which included restricting the ability to write data from classified computers onto removable disks, restricting transfers of information from classified to unclassified systems and better monitoring of suspicious computer activity using similar tactics employed by credit card companies.

NATO slams release

NATO slammed Tuesday the release of the confidential U.S. files as "illegal, irresponsible and dangerous," spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said.

"As a matter of policy we won't comment on classified information and we strongly condemn the leaking of confidential documents," Longescu insisted.

However, "it is illegal, irresponsible and dangerous, regardless of whether the leaked material is diplomatic or military," she underlined.

Sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables placed on the Internet by WikiLeaks show that most of the 200 U.S. nuclear bombs still left in Europe are located in NATO member countries Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Turkey.

While these countries have raised the issue of disarmament, the precise location of these tactical bombs had not been made official prior to the latest leaks.

In the text files, a top Berlin official is logged as having told U.S. counterparts it "made no sense to unilaterally withdraw 'the 20' tactical nuclear weapons still in Germany while Russia maintains 'thousands' of them."

He added that a "withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Germany and perhaps from Belgium and the Netherlands could make it very difficult politically for Turkey to maintain its own stockpile."

The whistleblowing site's Australian founder Julian Assange on Tuesday appealed to Sweden's Supreme Court to overturn a ruling he should be detained for questioning on allegations of rape.