Here’s one of the hottest news that prevails in the online world. Guess you guys are aware of the hacking of PayPal that happened last December. For those who don’t here’s the story.
The Hack
PayPal, the world-famous money transfer giant was hacked last December. The hackers had organized a series of distributed denial-of service (DDos) attacks. It is said that the attacks were carried out by a group of hackers connected to the online image board 4chan. This group is often referred to as Anonymous. It seems like the Anonymous is an ardent fan of the WikiLeaks. It makes sure that every financial company that denies service to WikiLeaks is hacked. PayPal hasn’t been the only prey of Anonymous. The group had been successful in hacking the site of Swiss Bank Post Finance, which had closed the account of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. A matter of regret is that this site is still unavailable for users. Another financial organization that has suffered at the hands of Anonymous is MasterCard. The attack in this site has been rather harsh. The company is still not able to repair the issues with its site and it is continuously down.
What Are DDos?
In simple words the distributed denial-of-service attack is nothing but to make a computer resource unavailable to its users. For example if you send unlimited number of mails to a recipient within a very short span of time it is obvious for the computer’s disk to become filled. As a result, the recipient will not be able to receive further mails. The very same happened with PayPal. The hackers sent extraordinary numbers of requests through specially designed programs to the website thereby tying it up.
The Aftermath
The FBI had been investigating the case for quite a long time. Finally, sixteen people who were suspected to be involved in the hacking have been arrested. All the suspects are from the United States. But it looks like this arrest hasn’t had any impact on Anonymous. The group has a huge list of further attacks, and the one that tops their list as of now is Twitter. Twitter, one of the most famous social-networking sites had been involved in the censoring of WikiLeaks’ discussion. Guess that the group is really mad at Twitter. It has been sending warning messages to this social networking site. CNN, FoxNews, Amazon and BBC seem to be the other targets of Anonymous.
To put it short, all the organizations that deny services for WikiLeaks are being attacked by Anonymous. It is not clear whether this hacking group is related to WikiLeaks or not, but it is sure that these hackers consider this international document leaking organization as an inspiration and try to work for its cause.
