Hackers under suspicion for Amazon crash
WEB giant Amazon last night became the latest suspected victim of a cyber attack by supporters of WikiLeaks.
The firm’s website was out of action for more than half an hour during one of the most lucrative shopping days in the run-up to Christmas.
The firm’s operations in the UK, France, Germany and Spain were all affected, although the firm is yet to confirm the outages were the result of hackers.
Amazon became a target for supporters of WikiLeaks after it decided to kick the website off its servers after allegedly coming under pressure from the US Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Activists operating under the name Anonymous had urged an online attack to crash amazon.com by overwhelming it with requests from users. The attack is triggered by supporters downloading a tool that allows thousands of computers to be remotely controlled by one master PC.
Last week the activists briefly brought down the sites of credit-card giants MasterCard and Visa which had stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks.