The site
appears to have recovered from the attack with the help of Amazon.com Inc.’s
US-based server-for-rent service. Late Tuesday morning, Web traffic to the site
was handled by Amazon Web Services.
The site,
which distributed a trove of US diplomatic documents on Sunday, said in a
Twitter message on Tuesday morning that it was under a “distributed denial of
service attack,” a method commonly used by hackers to slow down or bring down
sites. WikiLeaks didn’t identify the attackers.
The site,
which is devoted to releasing anonymously submitted documents, also came under
attack Sunday, but Tuesday’s attack appeared to be more powerful.
Calls to
Seattle-based Amazon.com were not immediately returned. Bahnhof, a Swedish
Internet company that has been involved in hosting WikiLeaks, had no immediate
comment on Tuesday.
In a
typical denial-of-service attack, remote computers commandeered by rogue
programs bombard a website with so many data packets that it becomes
overwhelmed and unavailable to visitors. Pinpointing the culprits is difficult.
WikiLeaks
said the malicious traffic was coming in at 10 gigabits per second on Tuesday,
which would make it a relatively large effort. According to a study by Internet
security company Arbor Networks, the average denial of service attack over the
past year was 349 megabits per second, 28 times slower than the stream
Wikileaks reported.
Sunday’s
attack didn’t stop the publication of stories based on messages leaked from the
US State Department in several major newspapers. WikiLeaks had given the media
outlets prior access to the diplomatic cables to publish in conjunction with
their Sunday release on its site.
The
cables, many of them classified, offer candid, sometimes unflattering
assessments of foreign leaders, ranging from US allies such as Germany and
Italy to other nations like Libya, Iran and Afghanistan.
