The hackers argued the so called “doxing” was incorrect. That spat caused Anonymous, the online collective, to post personal information of individuals they claimed to be members of OurMine. It’s the third time the hackers have gone after WikiLeaks, after twice launching a DDoS attack – a form of cyber-attack where a site is overloaded with connections in an attempt to bring it to its knees – against the organisation, in December 2015 and July 2016.
In the message it posted to the organisation’s web address, OurMine jokingly begins to claim to be “testing your …” before breaking off and reminding WikiLeaks about the time “you challenged us to hack you”. The WikiLeaks hack also takes a different approach in its substance.
An OurMine spokesperson confirmed to the Guardian that the attack was DNS poisoning, carried out through hacking Wikileaks’ domain provider. The DNS protocol is a notoriously weak link of the internet due to the ease with which it can be compromised by both malicious individuals and state actors. It is unlikely WikiLeaks own servers were breached. For a brief period, those DNS servers told browsers that was actually located on a server controlled by OurMine. Rather than attacking WikiLeaks’ servers directly, they have convinced one or more DNS servers, which are responsible for turning the human-readable “” web address into a machine-readable string of numbers that tells a computer where to connect, to alter their records. The group appears to have carried out an attack known as “DNS poisoning” for a short while on Thursday morning. The attack saw visitors to redirected to a page created by OurMine which claimed that the attack was a response to a challenge from the organisation to hack them.īut while it may have been humiliating for WikiLeaks, which prides itself on technical competency, the actual “hack” appears to have been a low-tech affair: the digital equivalent of spray-painting graffiti on the front of a bank then claiming to have breached its security.
WikiLeaks suffered an embarrassing cyber-attack when Saudi Arabian-based hacking group OurMine took over its web address.
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