WikiLeaks woes
The controversial WikiLeaks site has moved back to Europe having been temporarily shut down by a domain name company.
The whistle blowing website, under fire for exposing US diplomatic documents and communications, now has its domain name registered in Switzerland, is hosted in Sweden and redirects to a server in France, according to a tweet by web security tester and author @paulmutton.
WikiLeaks had to find a new home again after the company providing it with domain name services, EveryDNS.net pulled the plug on the website because it had been targeted by numerous cyber attacks, which it claimed threatened access to other websites, the BBC reported.
WikiLeaks confirmed its domain had been ‘killed' by EveryDNS via Twitter before appealing: ‘Keep us strong'.
However, the firm had given WikiLeaks 24 hour's notice before terminating the site, according to a statement on EveryDNS' site.
It reportedly said that WikiLeaks had become a magnet for "multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks" and that "these attacks have and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites."
"Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider," it reportedly added.
WikiLeaks is said to claim that its site has been under attack ever since it published 250,000 US diplomatic cables and tried to seek refuge using Amazon's computers but was kicked off.
While not commenting at the time, Amazon has now said it stopped hosting the whistle blowing site as it violated Amazon's terms of service, The WSJ reported.
Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon told the newspaper that reports that the etailer had bowed to pressure from the US government to oust WikiLeaks were ‘inaccurate'.
The company rents server space on a self-service basis so ‘does not pre-screen its customers' but can get rid of firms that violate its terms of service, Herdener reportedly said. One of Amazon's contractual rules is that firms own or control all the rights to classified content and WikiLeaks does not, he added.
Herdener reportedly said that Amazon needs to ensure that information ‘will not cause injury to any person or entity' but added: "It is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy."
He also is said to have admitted that Amazon's servers came under attack after it began hosting the WikiLeaks content.
