Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Wikileaks evades hackers with shift to Amazon

Website moves front page to Amazon server hire service but keeps US embassy cables out of reach

Wikileaks, the site that has infuriated the US government by releasing thousands of US diplomatic cables, is being hosted by one of the symbols of that country's internet success - Amazon.

The site came under a "Distributed Denial of Service" (DDOS) attack on Sunday night from an unidentified hacker, forcing it to seek a new location for its computer files. And it found it through Amazon's "Elastic Cloud Computing" (EC2) service, which enables businesses to hire its servers and store their data there.

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, is neither.

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