WikiLeaks evicted from Amazon servers
WikiLeaks was today booted from Amazon servers – forcing the controversial organization to once again take up residence on more vulnerable European service providers. In a Twitter message posted earlier today, reps for WikiLeaks, which recently released hundreds of secret US diplomatic cables, called the ouster a free-speech issue.
"WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free – fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe," the message read.
WikiLeaks had sought refuge at Amazon after a series of crippling DDOS attacks which temporarily rendered the WikiLeaks site inaccessible to users in the US and abroad. Distributed denial-of-service attacks work by flooding a Web page with requests for service, eventually overpowering servers and shutting down the site. The ploy has become an increasingly popular one among hackers.
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Reps for the security firm Arbor Networks told the Register yesterday that the attack on WikiLeaks was "modest by the standards of other attacks this year," but "nonetheless severe enough for Wikileaks to move its systems back over to Amazon's cloud infrastructure in order to seek shelter from the storm." (Read more about the DDOS assault on WikiLeaks here.)
The WikiLeaks document dump has raised the ire of many US politicians, and there is speculation that WikiLeaks founder could be charged under the Espionage Act. The Associated Press reported today that Amazon evicted WikiLeaks "after congressional staffers called the company Tuesday to inquire about its relationship with WikiLeaks."
