October 21, 2016, 05:39 pm

WikiLeaks urges supporters to 'stop taking down the US internet'




The site WikiLeaks asked its “supporters” on Friday to stop taking down the internet in the U.S. following a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that disrupted a number of major sites.

“Mr. Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing,” the site tweeted. “We ask supporters to stop taking down the US internet. You proved your point.”

WikiLeaks Verified account ‏@wikileaks

Mr. Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing. We ask supporters to stop taking down the US internet. You proved your point.



Two domain name system tools, DynDNS and Amazon Web Services, reported earlier that they had experienced outages. DynDNS had attributed its outages to a DDoS hack, while AWS has yet to identify the cause to its own disruptions.

The Department of Homeland Security said that it is investigating the incident but has not pointed to any suspects.

The WikiLeaks tweet raises the possibility that the attacks could be retaliation for Julian Assange’s internet connection being severed by the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Assange has been living since 2012 to avoid a rape charge in Sweden that he denies.

Ecuador cut the Australian activist's internet connection over his attempt to affect the U.S. presidential election. WikiLeaks has released a series of document
troves that have proven embarrassing to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.

“The Government of Ecuador respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states. It does not interfere in external electoral processes, nor does it favor any particular candidate,” the country said in a statement.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefi...ng-down-the-us