Some online service providers are in the cross hairs this week for allegedly abandoning WikiLeaks after it published secret U.S. diplomatic cables and drew retaliatory technical, political and legal attacks. But the secret-spilling site’s woes may be attributable in part to its own technical and administrative missteps as well as outside attempts at censorship.
Struggling with denial-of-service attacks on its servers earlier this week, WikiLeaks moved to Amazon’s EC2 cloud-based data-storage service only to be summarily booted off on Wednesday, ostensibly for violations of Amazon’s terms of service. Then on Thursday its domain-name service provider, EveryDNS, stopped resolving WikiLeaks.org, amid a new DoS attack apparently aimed at the DNS provider.
While WikiLeaks was clearly targeted, its weak countermeasures drew criticism from network engineers. They questioned its use of a free DNS service such as EveryDNS, as well as other avoidable errors that seem to clash with WikiLeaks’ reputation as a tech-savvy and cautious enterprise hardened to withstand any concerted technical attack on its systems.
“If they wanted to help users get past their DNS problems, they could tweet for assistance, tweet their IP addy and ask to be re-tweeted, ask owners of authorities to set up wikileaks.$FOO.com to ‘crowd source’ their name, etc.,” observed one poster to the mailing list for the North American Network Operating Group. “So at the very least, they are guilty of not being imaginative.”
“IMHO it is a gambit to ask for money,” wrote another.
WikiLeaks’ downtime was short-lived, with the site announcing Friday on Twitter that it was operational on WikiLeaks.de, WikiLeaks.fi, WikiLeaks.nl and WikiLeaks.ch — the country codes respectively for Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The scattering followed a Thursday outage of WikiLeaks.org and the “Cablegate” subsite, that occurred when EveryDNS cut off the secret-spilling site.
Unlike the incident this week in which Amazon unceremoniously booted WikiLeaks from its servers, the latest outage appears to have had less to do with censorship than with WikiLeaks’ inattention to the more-mundane side of running an organization.
