WikiLeaks Releases DNCLeak2; Suffers Massive DDoS Attack

The official website of WikiLeaks suffered a brief outage when it came under DDoS attacks right after posting new DNC e-mails earlier today.

WikiLeaks has revealed that their email publication server has been suffering massive DDoS attacks since the platform published a new trove of DNC e-mails dubbed as DNCLeak2). On Twitter, WikiLeaks announced that their website was down briefly which is rare and being investigated.

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https://t.co/nxEDEZBO1j was down briefly. That's rare. We're investigating.

Increase our capacity: https://t.co/E0xiQUBHah

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 7, 2016

After a few minutes, the organization Tweeted that their email publication servers were under a targeted DoS attack since releasing DNCLeak2. It also asked followers to donate so the server capacity can be increased.

https://t.co/nxEDEZBO1j was down briefly. That's rare. We're investigating.

Increase our capacity: https://t.co/E0xiQUBHah

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 7, 2016

The release of more than 8263 new emails came after WikiLeaks released more than 50,000 emails stolen from the account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. In July this year, Democratic National Committee suffered a breach after which the 20,000 stolen DNC emails were published by WikiLeaks leading to the resignation of party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

It is unclear who was behind the attack but it does indicate that (distributed denial of service) DDoS attacks are not only increasing but vastly used by hackers and state-sponsored actors against political leaders, opposition, whistleblowing and those platforms believing in freedom of the press.

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Earlier today, the microblogging website Twitter was also down for about 15 minutes however it is unclear if it was a DDoS attack or connected to the release of DNCLeak2. At the time of publishing this article, WikiLeaks website was restored and reachable.