Non-profit organization WikiLeaks reported through a Twitter post that it has suffered a cyber strike, less than 24 hours after publishing more than 8,000 emails Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, in which it was revealed how the Democrat National Convention (DNC) helped important medias as the Washington Post and CNN to prepare interviews and articles about Donald Trump.
A DDoS Cyber Strike
The Julian Assange´s group explained that the cyber strike could have be made by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), which works by sending an overwhelming amount of web traffic towards a server in order to force it offline, according to the International Business Times.
https://t.co/nxEDEZBO1j was down briefly. That's rare. We're investigating.
Increase our capacity: https://t.co/E0xiQUBHah
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 7 de noviembre de 2016
Our email publication servers are under a targeted DoS attack since releasing #DNCLeak2 You can increase capacity: https://t.co/MsNZhrTzTL — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 7 de noviembre de 2016
On the morning of November 7, the non-profit organization posted some updates to its followers, saying that: "WikiLeaks.org was down briefly. That's rare. We're investigating." Later, it added: "Our email publication servers are under a targeted DoS attack since releasing #DNCLeak2". As reported in a previous article, this kind of cyber strike was also suffered by major websites as Reddit, Spotify, Twitter and GitHub last month.
Assange Blames The DNC
The U.S. government that accused Russia of interfering with the 2016 presidential elections, explaining that they are the ones behind WikiLeaks´ releases. Apparently, the emails were hacked by two groups in the past years that have been related by the U.S. intelligence and private sector to major instances on Vladimir Putin´s government. However, both the transparency radical organization and the Kremlin have denied the claims.
By his part, Julian Assange blames the DNC for the cyber strike, claiming that this is a move from the Democrats in order to stop him from keep releasing documents that could harm Hillary Clinton´s image before the election.
