Shortly before a massive DDoS attack against DynDNS, who serves Twitter, Pinterest, Spotify and other large internet services, Wikileaks tweeted that the Ecuadorian embassy was being surrounded by heavily armed police since Tuesday
Just hours before the massive internet service outage, Wikileaks tweeted a photo of heavily armed police outside the embassy, a photo which was taken Tuesday and presumably still valid today:
PHOTO: Heavily armed ‘police’ appear outside Ecuadorian Embassy in London where Julian Assange has political asylum (photo, Tuesday morning) pic.twitter.com/EOfsrmi3t2
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 21, 2016
Julian Assange may have asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, but since Saturday he no longer has the ability to communicate with the outside world via the internet. The move was instructed by the Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa in response to pressure from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry after a treasure trove of emails from John Podesta, Clinton campaign’s chief official, was leaked over the past month.
Since our main source of info from Wikileaks was Twitter, details about the development are scarce, but we do know that the DDoS attack targeted a DNS service that works with Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Shopify, Pinterest and other large websites, so the attack may not be related. However, if the U.S. wanted to silence Wikileaks while they arrested Assange, this would be one way to do it, albeit at the expense of a whole host of services that were not complicit in any Wikileaks events.
While the cyber attack may cause millions of dollars of lost revenue, if it was carried out by the NSA, or some other U.S. intelligence organization, we all know that something that is “a matter of national security” trumps all other things.
The Twitter outage comes just hours after the Wikileaks official Twitter account tweeted that they had a surprise in store for Time Kain and Donna Brazile, Hillary’s VP and DNC chairwoman respectively.
We have a suprise in store for @TimKaine and @DonnaBrazile.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 20, 2016
UPDATE: DynDNS service has been restored and Twitter is back up, with a tweet from Wikileaks asking hackers to stop the DDoS for the good of what Wikileaks is trying to do. They also tweeted a somewhat cryptic message regarding U.S. “instruments of state” attempting to silence them:
Mr. Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing. We ask supporters to stop taking down the US internet. You proved your point. pic.twitter.com/XVch196xyL
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 21, 2016
The Obama administration should not have attempted to misuse its instruments of state to stop criticism of its ruling party candidate.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 21, 2016