Anonymous Attacks VISA, Loses Facebook and Twitter Account

As expetected, following Visa’s decision to block WikiLeaks donations, Anonymous launched DDoS attacks against its website, but the hacktivist group faces troubles of its own.

It seems that the virtual war between Anonymous and organizations acting against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, continues.

It started with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against PayPal’s blog and continued with PostFinance Swiss bank, the Swedish Office of Public Prosecutions and MasterCard.

Things went a little further with MasterCard, with the group trying to start a smear campaign against the company by falsely claiming that a major credit card breach had occurred.

A file with fake credit card numbers and expiry dates was generated and a link to it was circulated on Twitter, which is probably the reason why the social media website suspended the Anonymous' profile.

The account has since been reinstated and several others have also appeared, each with thousands of followers that relay information.

Facebook suspended Anonymous’ Operation Payback page, citing terms of service violations, but a new one was created to replace it.

Visa.com has become a primary target and was down for most of today, after the company announced that it will block the ability of Visa credit card owners to donate to WikiLeaks.

The attacks have increased in effectiveness and are directed at more critical targets. For example, in PayPal case the attacks moved from the insignificant thepaypalblog.com domain, to the main paypal.com site and more recently to api.paypal.com, which is crucial to merchants.

But the cyber vigilante group has had DDoS problems itself. Its anonops.net website was attacked several times and is now offline because it no longer has a DNS provider. Meanwhile, the connectivity on the IRC server used for coordinating attacks is intermittent.

This cyber mess will likely continue, because Anonymous is not a group known to give up easily. Its last DDoS campaign against anti-piracy groups lasted for over two months.