The Week in WikiLeaks

Internet infrastructure has made headlines in recent days as global media has tracked the controversies surrounding the Wikileaks web site and subsequent DDoS attacks attributed to Anonymous. Here's a roundup of some of the best analysis from around the web:

Netcraft News: Probably the best place to track the fast-moving changes in Wikileaks' infrastructure has been Netcraft, where Paul Mutton has supplied regular updates throughout the hosting shifts for Wikileaks. I could be biased, because I blogged for Netcraft for four years. But Netcraft has done a fine job leveraging its data and expertise.

WikiLeaks: Moving Target - An analysis from Renesys, which tracks Internet routing: "They lost their Web hosting, their payment services, and ultimately the use of the domain name itself, all while coming under withering DDoS attacks and intermittent nation-level blacklisting. And yet, WikiLeaks stays up, taunting their adversaries with their jaunty hourglass and hourly tweets of coming attractions. "

EasyDNS Wrongly Blamed, Then Supports WikiLeaks: Kim Zetter from Wired's Threat Level blog picks up on the DNS component of the story. "A DNS provider that suffered backlash last week after it was wrongly identified as supplying and then dropping DNS service to WikiLeaks has decided to support the secret-spilling site, offering DNS service to two domains distributing WikiLeaks content."

The Story Behind the Mastercard and VISA DDoS Attacks - Barrett Lyon, a pioneer in DDoS defense, blogs about this week's attacks: "Their DDoS tool is called LOIC or “Low Orbit Ion Cannon”, which was originally a web site load testing utility that was open sourced. These guys hacked in a new feature called HIVEMIND, which allows you to start LOIC and have it connect back to anonops for instructions."

Web Attackers Find a Rallying Cry in WikiLeaks - What hath 4Chan wrought? Anonymous is accorded significant gravitas in a front-page story in the New York Times: "The coordinated attacks on major corporate and government Web sites in defense of WikiLeaks, which began on Wednesday and continued on Thursday, suggested that the loosely organized group called Anonymous might have come of age, evolving into one focused on more serious matters: in this case, the definition of Internet freedom."

Anonymous stops dropping DDoS bombs, starts dropping science: Sean Bonner of Boing Boing reports on a possible strategy shift for Anonymous: "The new approach suggests more sophisticated thinking. This new mission, apparently, is to actually read the cables Wikileaks has published and find the most interesting bits that haven't been publicized yet, then publicize them."