Loose hacktivist collective Anonymous took down the MasterCard website again for two hours in continuing protests against the company blocking funds to WikiLeaks.
According to Mashable, the announcement was tweeted by someone connected with Anonymous and retweeted by the hacker collective.
Finextra reports that the MasterCard site was subject to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which took the site down. It appears to be back up at time of writing.
A MasterCard spokesperson confirmed the outage to MSNBC and emphasised that no cardholder data was compromised and that consumers can continue to use their cards.
This is the second time Anonymous has DDoS attacked MasterCard’s website for withdrawing their payment services from whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. MasterCard previously said it was blocking these services as it believes WikiLeaks had engaged in “illegal activity.”
WikiLeaks later posted a statement, pointing out the fact that five major financial institutions – VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union and Bank of America – have blocked payments to the site for six months.
WikiLeaks condemns the blockade from these financial services, saying it has “no lawful grounds.”
