WikiLeaks: An Information War in the Clouds Gets Taken to the Ground

Much ink has been spilled about the diplomatic cable leak facilitated by WikiLeaks. Almost as interesting as the leaks themselves, however, is the information war that is being waged against WikiLeaks, and the measures the site has had to take just to stay accessible.

Over the course of the last week, the site has suffered from a sustained Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. In such an attack, a group of computers – sometimes numbering in the millions – attempt to saturate a target host with a flood of requests, thereby consuming all of the hosts’ computation resources and leaving the host unable to respond to legitimate requests.

In response to these attacks WikiLeaks has hopped from one hosting provider to the next. When WikiLeaks originally published the leaked diplomatic cables, is was hosted by Swedish company PRQ. Since the host was based in Sweden, WikiLeaks was able to remain in operation despite the fact that US-based courts demanded the site be taken down.

Under the flood of DDOS traffic, the site moved briefly to Amazon’s cloud, which promptly booted the site due to violations of Amazon’s Terms of Service (or, some would say, pressure from Senator Joe Liberman). The site then retreated to a new Swedish hosting provider, Banhof.

The DDOS attack then targeted WikiLeak’s DNS provider, EveryDNS. The Domain Name System (DNS) system allows you to resolve an Internet domain name, such as www.wikileaks.com, to an IP address for the physical machine it is hosted on, such as 213.251.145.96. Without DNS, a website becomes essentially unreachable. Shortly after the DDOS on EveryDNS started, the company alerted Wikileaks that it would be forced to kick WikiLeaks off of its DNS infrastructure.

WikiLeaks, scrambling under the sustained pressure from both authorities and the unrelenting DDOS attack, has now reportedly moved its servers to both Switzerland and France, and legal action to take down those servers is already underway.

The very public DDOS and legal attacks on WikiLeaks provide a fascinating glimpse into what the John Perry Barlow of the EFF calls the “first serious information war“. The frustration of various governments to take WikiLeaks down via legal action further underlines the fact that, as nebulous a concept as “the cloud” might be, ultimately all data lives on physical servers within the confines of a specific legal jurisdiction.