Hackers hit Mastercard and Visa over Wikileaks row
Baku, December 9 (AZERTAC) Hackers have attacked the websites of credit card giants Mastercard and Visa.
The attacks came after the Anonymous group of hackers pledged to pursue firms that have withdrawn services from Wikileaks.
Mastercard payments were disrupted but the firm said there was "no impact" on people`s ability to use their cards.
Visa`s website also experienced problems. The attacks came after both companies stopped processing payments to the whistle-blowing site.
Entries on the Twitter page of Operation Payback, the Anonymous campaign, said the Visa site had been taken down.
Visa`s website was later restored and spokesman Ted Carr said its processing network, which handles cardholder transactions, was working normally.
But in a day of fast-moving developments, the Anonymous Twitter page then went down, replaced by a message from Twitter saying the account had been suspended.
Twitter say they do not comment on "the actions we take on specific user accounts". However, a source told the BBC that the last tweet sent out by Anonymous included a link to a file containing consumer credit card information.
Paul Mutton at the security firm Netcraft, who is monitoring the attacks, said Visa is considered a more difficult target and the attack on it required a much larger number of "hacktivist" - politically motivated hackers - 2,000 compared with 400 for Mastercard.
Earlier the BBC was contacted by a payment firm linked to Mastercard that said its customers had "a complete loss of service".
In particular, it said that an authentication service for online payments known as Mastercard`s SecureCode, had been disrupted.
Other readers have also said that they have had problems with online payments. The scale of the problems is still unclear.
Mastercard acknowledged there had been "a service disruption" involving its SecureCode system, but it added: "Our core processing capabilities have not been compromised and cardholder account data has not been placed at risk.
"While we have seen limited interruption in some web-based services, cardholders can continue to use their cards for secure transactions globally."
Anonymous, which claimed to have carried out the attack, is a loose-knit group of hacktivists, with links to the notorious message board 4chan.
It said that it has hit several targets, including the website of the prosecutors who are acting in a legal case against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
Security experts said the sites had been targeted by a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), which swamp a site with so many page requests that it becomes overwhelmed and drops offline.
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