WikiLeaks as a Preview of All-Out Cyberwar, Part 2 – The Escalation

Updating twothree points from my post last week, WikiLeaks as a Preview of All-Out Cyberwar. I wrote:

On the opposite site, you have the WikiLeaks organization itself moving its content to various places and among various providers… desperately seeking a way to keep itself online. But even more you have supporters of WikiLeaks downloading all the content and popping up mirror sites all over the place, trying to keep the organization’s content out there. The distributed and decentralized nature of the Internet allows easily for this type of content propagation.

Through the WikiLeaks Twitter page, they have been reporting the growth in mirror sites, most recently 507 mirrors. (Note the reported checkbox for new mirror sites.) Which, of course, provides a nice hit list to those who want to shut it down…

And every new site or domain name that pops up with WikiLeaks content becomes yet another target for those wishing to knock the organization offline.

… such as the report today that the WikiLeaks servers in Sweden are under attack.

And undoubtedly there are supporters of WikiLeaks out there who are trying to counter-attack the attackers.

UPDATE, 2 hours later: I noticed this in a NY Times piece yesterday: The collective Anonymous, an informal but notorious group of hackers and activists, also declared war on Sunday against enemies of Mr. Assange, calling on supporters to attack sites companies that do not support WikiLeaks and to spread the leaked material online.

As I wrote last week:

I think it will get uglier before it’s all over.

Indeed, TechCrunch wonders how long the @wikileaks Twitter account will stay around