Wiki’s Cyber Threat Turns Real
For the past few days, speculation was ripe that WikiLeaks was looming under a threat of cyber attacks. On Tuesday, WikiLeaks' Twitter page had an update saying"WikiLeaks.org is presently under attack", which was later clarified to be a cyber attack in another twitter feed.
Until recently, rumor had it that a password to WikiLeaks' entire database – a collection of about 250,000 US State Department cables – had been hacked. On Thursday, Australian newspaper The Age, reported that the password had indeed been discovered, and all data to WikiLeaks website was now available. WikiLeaks is now being severely criticized internationally for not being able to maintain its internal security. What unnerves the US is that the cables in the database are raw and unedited, unlike what is released by WikiLeaks, and has a lot of sensitive information, including diplomatic sources and names of intelligence officers.