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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Computer War--Hackers strike back to support WikiLeaks founder

The online attacks are part of a wave of support for WikiLeaks that is sweeping the Internet. Twitter was choked with messages of solidarity Wednesday for the group, while the site's Facebook page hit 1 million fans.



Offline, the organization is under pressure on many fronts. Assange, who turned himself in to London police on Tuesday, is now in a British prison fighting extradition to Sweden over a sex crimes case. Moves by Swiss Postfinance, MasterCard, PayPal and others, meanwhile, have impaired the secret-spilling group's ability to raise money.



The pro-WikiLeaks vengeance campaign appeared to be taking the form of denial of service attacks in which computers across the Internet are harnessed — sometimes surreptitiously — to jam target sites with mountains of requests for data, knocking them out of commission.



PayPal's vice president of platform, Osama Bedier, said the company froze WikiLeaks' account after receiving a letter from the U.S. State Department "saying that the WikiLeaks activities were deemed illegal in the


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