Operation: Payback announces on Twitter planned Web attack on Visa

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Operation: Payback is one of the latest examples of hackers taking to social media websites such as Twitter, blogs and other forums on the Internet to plan and take credit for Web-based attacks agianst MasterCard and next Visa in defnese of WikiLeaks.

A group of hackers calling themselves Anonymous said on its Twitter account, that Operation: Payback is an ‘ongoing campaign by Anonymous against major anti-piracy & anti-freedom entities.’

From @Anon_operation, a tweet sent at 11:32 a.m. today read:

The hash tag #ddos indicates that the group is planning to use a distributed denial of service attack, a common method used by hackers to crash a website’s servers and make it temporarily unavailable to users.

WikiLeaks tweeted last week, after releasing thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, that its site was temporarily unusable because of DDoS attacks.

The tweet about the group’s plan against Visa follows similar messages in which the group took credit for an attack on MasterCard in retaliation for the credit card companies stopping their acceptance of donations to WikiLeaks.

Last week, a self-proclaimed ‘hacktivist’ named Jester tweeted that he was responsible for an attack on WikiLeaks last week.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles