A week ago, Paul Vixie wrote a thoughtful piece on the morality of DDos, for both sides of the equation of the Wikileaks issues. In it he summarizes things nicely:

Denial of service is not merely a peaceful protest meant to garner attention for a cause. Denial of service is forcible and it is injurious. It is not like any form of civil disobedience, but rather it is criminal behaviour more like looting.

Well said, Paul. I find myself vacillating between sympathy for Wikileaks, and their right to publish and the need to have them publish what they have, and the need to preserve security, national and international. I atypically don’t come down firmly on one side or the other. Activism of their sort keeps our society sane, but yet, lives may have been put at risk by their disclosure. I truly can’t be pro or con to the issue.

What I can rail against readily is people who bring THE DUMB, and the people behind the DDoS in the pro-Wikieleaks have bought it, and brought it, wholesale, it seems. wikileaks.info is a fake mirror of Wikileaks, sitting in a sewer of malware. The IP had long been listed at Spamhaus, the venerable anti-abuse blacklist had included it in their offerings. When the wikileaks.info site was put up to capitalize on the current furor, it too was listed.

AnonOps, in their blind fervour to uphold free speech by censorship decided Spamahaus ws in the wrong, dismissed their explanation, and have taken down the Spamhaus website. As far as I know, this has not interrupted DNS lookups nor rsync of their services, but it has impeded their ability to warn people off going to that one site, that is virtually guaranteed to get someone p0wned.

Steve Linford posted the following:

“As our site can’t be reached now, we can not continue to warn Wikileaks users not to load things from the Heihachi IP. If you know journalists who would get this message out, please forward this message (entire) to them.”

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In a statement released today on wikileaks.info entitled “Spamhaus’ False Allegations Against wikileaks.info”, the person running the wikileaks.info site (which is not connected with Julian Assange or the real Wikileaks organization) called Spamhaus’s information on his infamous cybercrime host “false” and “none of our business” and called on people to contact Spamhaus and “voice your opinion”. Consequently Spamhaus has now received a number of emails some asking if we “want to be next”, some telling us to stop blacklisting Wikileaks (obviously they don’t understand that we never did) and others claiming we are “a pawn of US Government Agencies”.

None of the people who contacted us realised that the “Wikileaks press release” published on wikileaks.info was not written by Wikileaks and not issued by Wikileaks - but by the person running the wikileaks.info site only - the very site we are warning about. The site data, disks, connections and visitor traffic, are all under the control of the Heihachi cybercrime gang. There are more than 40 criminal-run sites operating on the same IP address as wikileaks.info, including carder-elite.biz, h4ck3rz.biz, elite-crew.net, and bank phishes paypal-securitycenter.com and postbank-kontodirekt.com.

Because they are using a Wikileaks logo, many people thought that the “press release” was issued “by Wikileaks”. In fact there has been no press release about this by Wikileaks and none of the official Wikileaks mirrors sites even recognise the wikileaks.info mirror. We wonder how long it will be before Wikileaks supporters wake up and start to question why wikileaks.info is not on the list of real Wikileaks mirrors at wikileaks.ch.

Currently wikileaks.info is serving highly sensitive leaked documents to the world, from a server fully controlled by Russian malware cybercriminals, to an audience that faithfully believes anything with a ‘Wikileaks’ logo on it.

Spamhaus continues to warn Wikileaks readers to make sure they are viewing and downloading documents only from an official Wikileaks mirror site. We’re not saying “don’t go to Wikileaks” we’re saying “Use the wikileaks.ch server instead”.

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