n the first test of WikiLeaks’ resiliency since a staff rebellion earlier this year, the organization recovered within hours from a distributed denial-of-service attack during its rollout of leaked State Department cables Sunday. But experts who monitored the disruptive traffic say the attack was relatively modest in size.
WikiLeaks’ main web address and its “cablegate” site were unreachable as the organization’s media partners published their first analyses from a massive trove of a quarter-million U.S. diplomatic cables Sunday afternoon. Hours earlier, WikiLeaks wrote on Twitter: “We are currently under a mass distributed denial-of-service attack.”
But Arbor Networks, which analyzes malicious network traffic crossing the internet’s backbones, reports that the DDoS generated between 2 and 4 Gbps of disruptive traffic, slightly above the average for all DDoS attacks, but well below the peak 60 to 100 Gbps consumed by truly massive attacks against other websites over the last year.
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