Perhaps Sarah Palin is the news-world’s equivalent of Fonzie “jumping the shark” – the entertainment industry’s measure of when a show has peaked and, thus, begun an inexorable creative decline.
If so, then we might expect coverage and breathless media attention of the ongoing Wikileaks Cablegate scandal to begin cooling off fast, now that the media-friendly former Vice Presidential candidate has entered the fray. Palin – or at least the Web site for SarahPAC, was attacked and credit card information stolen, according to a report from CBS News. The attacks were apparently in retaliation for Palin’s criticism of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who Palin called “anti American” and accused of having “blood on his hands.”
Of course, being the victim of a DDoS attack carried out by Anonymous or other Wikileaks supporters put you in good company by end of week. Among other firms or individuals targetd by the group are PayPal, Amazon.com, Visa and Mastercard, all of which moved to deny access to their services to Wikileaks. PostFinance, a bank that shuttered accounts belonging to Assange, and the Swedish Prosecution Authority pursuing charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange found their online properties under attack. Even Panda Security’s blog, which has covered the ongoing DDoS attacks, appears to have been knocked offline intermittently just for talking about the denial of service attacks.
Despite vocal protests from governments around the world, the leaked cables continued to be easily available online, with more than 1,300 Web sites now sharing (or “mirroring”) the Cablegate content for Wikileaks, the organization reported.
Anonymous, the libertarian-leaning hacktivist umbrella group claiming responsibility for those attacks found itself on the outs with social networks Twitter and Facebook on Thursday,which suspended accounts belonging to the group, even while both social networks have pledged to continue hosting pages and accounts for Wikileaks itself. That, following reports that the group may have enlisted a 30,000 node-strong criminal botnet in addition to a 3,000 node volunteer network to carry out its attacks on PayPal, Mastercard and other sites, according to data from Panda Security.
And, if more proof was needed that Wikileaks is the story that everyone loves to hate, the Associated
Press is reporting that Amazon.com is now offering a Kindle e-book in the
UK authored by a Heinz Duthel with excerpts from some of the Cablegate
documents – this despite that company’s decision to deny a haven to Wikileaks itself. Amazon claims: “This
book contains commentary and analysis regarding recent WikiLeaks disclosures,
not the original material disclosed via the WikiLeaks website.”
