PayPal.'s website was hit late Wednesday by two botnets as online activists continued their Web attacks on companies that have severed their relationships withWikileaks..
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The activists have recruited volunteers, who have banded their computers into a distributed denial of service (DDoS) botnet, but they are also using hacked machines to carry out these attacks, said Sean-Paul Correll of threat researcher Panda Security. "Today we observed over 3,000 computers in the voluntary botnet, but we also have knowledge of a 30k node botnet," he said.
This botnet infects computers via peer to peer filesharing systems, but it can spread via Microsoft Messenger and USB sticks as well, he said. Panda is trying to get a sample of the botnet code to analyze.
PayPal.was hit late Wednesday afternoon, Pacific time, and the Paypal.com address was unresponsive into early Thursday morning. "There have been attempted DDoS attacks on paypal.com this week," said company spokesman Anuj Nayar. "The attacks slowed the website itself down for a short while, but did not significantly impact payments."
贝宝的博客been hit earlier in the week, but the main Paypal.com Web site was down for at least several hours Wednesday, and www.paypal.com was affected too, although less seriously. Unlike Visa and MasterCard, the website is critical to PayPal's business. Customers need the Web site to send money to other PayPal users.
Paypal wasn't the only company to have some payments affected, however.MasterCard's SecureCode service-- used to add a security code for use in online transactions, similar to a PIN (personal identification number), also suffered a disruption Wednesday, said MasterCard spokesman James Issokson. "There were some operational issues and they have been resolved," he said.
匿名集团的经营投资回报的代表表示，他们负责这种中断。他们认为万事达卡的Web服务器可以使用Securecode系统共享资源。在万事达卡咨询中，published on the Securetrading blog, MasterCard said that a directory server had failed.
Both MasterCard and Visa also had their public websites knocked offlineby a "hive" of as many as 3,000 activists who had downloaded Web-attacking software, which was then turned on different Web sites.
For several months now, Operation Payback has gone after Web sites belonging to organizations that have cracked down on unlicensed music and movie copying -- the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). This week, the project took up cyber arms against companies that have cut business ties withWikileaks.，使网站努力筹集资金并继续运营。他们还打击了属于维基解密的网站，例如美国参议员Joseph Lieberman和前阿拉斯加·哥哥萨拉佩林。
For Operation Payback, attacks onWikileaks.are attacks on free speech.
"We are really just a collection of people from all walks of life, all over the world who are sick of watching people being exploited by outdated and vague copyright/freedom laws," said one group member who used the name Emily in an online chat.
The attacks will continue until those laws are reformed, Emily said.
但操作有自己的麻烦。Facebook和Twitter已被本集团使用的封闭账户，其网站也在周三离线。替换账户such as this Twitter pagesoon sprang up, however.
罗伯特麦克米兰covers computer security and general technology breaking news forThe IDG News Service. Follow Robert on Twitter at@bobmcmillan. Robert's e-mail address isrobert_mcmillan@idg.com
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