Denial-of-Service attack on Wikileaks, courtesy patriot hacker

The Denial of Service (DoS) attack against whistleblower site Wikileaks on Sunday was not a state-sponsored attack but was courtesy a patriot hacker called The Jester.

After Wikileaks started posting the controversial dossier of 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables on Sunday, the site was brought down for a time by a DoS attack.

The Jester claimed that the attack was formulated by him through a Twitter update on Sunday that read TANGO DOWN - for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, 'other assets' & foreign relations. He calls himself hactivist for good and is usually embroiled in bringing down jihadists sites. His message of triumph reads TANGO DOWN on Twitter every time he hits a site.

According to The Register the hacker used an application level assault targeting vulnerability in Wikileak's Apache web server. He has earlier used XerXeS attack tool to bring down jihadist sites.

DoS is a method which deprives an organization or a user of the services of a particular resource that they would require for functioning. In a distributed denial of service (DdoS), large number of compromised systems (botnet) attack a particular system using a tactic that sends huge traffic to a network causing temporary cessation of its operation.

However, whether the DDoS was the lone work of The Jester is hard to prove.