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A denial of service attack against Wikileaks that brought the whistleblower site to its knees on Sunday night, in the run up to its publication of classified State Department documents, may turn out to be the work of a lone hacker.
The attack, which rendered the site inaccessible for several hours, might be blamed on an application level assault targeting a vulnerability in Wikileak's Apache web server, according to internet reports.
A patriot-hacker called The Jester has previously used the XerXeS attack tool to attack jihadist sites. Now, if rumours are to be believed this tool was turned against Wikileaks on Sunday, making the site unavailable at a critical time.
Hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables were still published by The Guardian, with extracts run by other high-profile media publications, so the attack failed to block access to the diplomatically and politically embarrassing information, always an unrealistic goal."We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attic," Wikileaks said on Sunday night, via updates to its Twitter feed. "El Pais, Le Monde, Speigel, Guardian & NYT will publish many US embassy cables tonight, even if WikiLeaks goes down," it added.
Rather than a purely conventional packet flood, it seems probable that the site was also hit by the XerXeS tool. Below video showing how the tool works
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