The Guardian reports that when Wikileaks came under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack on Sunday night from an unidentified hacker, it used Amazon's "Elastic Cloud Computing" (EC2) service as a convenient way of evading the attack. DDOS attacks typically force sites off the net unless they have enormous bandwidth at their disposal or highly effective countermeasures. Wikileaks, being small and struggling for funds, has neither.
In theory, if the US government decides that WikiLeaks has broken the law in publishing federal intelligence data, the US could move to have WikiLeaks booted from such US-based servers but WikiLeaks could simply fall back on its core servers — presumably still hosted by "bulletproof" Swedish hosting outfit PRQ — and the feds would take a PR hit. "It's unlikely that Wikileaks views Amazon's EC2 service as a permanent solution to its hosting needs," writes Lawrence Latif at the Register.
"However its choice of Amazon is perhaps the ultimate single finger salute at the US government." In an added twist, Wikileaks is also using software from Seattle-based outfit Tableau to visually map its trove of leaked diplomatic cables. Tableau grew out of a project run by the US Department of Defense.
Photo: The Cloud by Gueorgui Tcherednitchenko Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
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