The technological and commercial skirmishes over WikiLeaks escalated into a full-blown online assault yesterday when, in a serious breach of internet security, a concerted online attack by activist supporters of WikiLeaks succeeded in disrupting MasterCard and Visa.
The acts were explicitly in "revenge" for the credit card companies' recent decisions to freeze all payments to the site, blaming illegal activity. Though it initially would acknowledge no more than "heavy traffic on its external corporate website", MasterCard was forced to admit last night that it had experienced "a service disruption to the MasterCard directory server", which banking sources said meant disruption throughout its global business.
Later, Visa's website was also inaccessible. A spokeswoman for Visa said the site was "experiencing heavier than normal traffic" and repeated attempts to load the Visa.com site was met without success.
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