MasterCard Website Taken Down ... Again
A hacker briefly took down the MasterCard.com website this morning (June 28).
At 7:00 a.m. EDT, the Twitter user "Ibom Hacktivist" wrote: "MasterCard.com DOWN!!!, that's what you get when you mess with @wikileaks @Anon_Central and the enter [sic] community of lulz loving individuals."
MasterCard.com was unreachable for nearly three hours. It came back online at about 9:45 a.m. EDT.
According to his tweets, Ibom Hacktivist launched what appeared to be a denial-of-service cyberattack to protest MasterCard's refusal to process the payments of WikiLeaks supporters last fall.
The opportunistic timing of the MasterCard takedown sheds some light on this new hacker's motives.
Anonymous executed its own MasterCard takedown in early December. Since then, however, the group has moved away from hounding WikiLeaks detractors and has gone on to play a pivotal part in the online aspect of the so-called "Arab Spring" uprisings in the Middle East, targeting government websites in Tunisia, Egypt and Iran.
So why, then, is Ibom Hacktivist still hung up on WikiLeaks?
It appears this new kid on the hacking scene is in it at least partly for the fame.
Since the merry pranksters of the Lulz Security group disbanded on Sunday (June 26), there's been a void left open for a fun-loving but dangerous hacker who feeds on media attention and is willing to carry out bold cyberattacks at the whim of his Twitter followers.
[LulzSec Makes Enemies of Fellow Hackers, Pretends Not to Care]
It seems Ibom Hacktivist is willing to fill that role.
At about 8:00 a.m., he wrote, "Didn't know you all hated M4s73rC4rd this much, Now the whole world is following my ass. Where's our destination followers? Cos am lost!"
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