Activists Say Web Assault for Assange Is Expanding

LONDON — The online activist group Anonymous, which has been waging a campaign of cyberattacks in defense of WikiLeaks, opened new offensives on Friday as Internet security experts said that tens of thousands more supporters had downloaded the attack software in the days since the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, was jailed in Britain.

The Web site for Moneybookers, a British PayPal competitor that ceased dealings with WikiLeaks in recent days, was under attack on Friday, according to members of Anonymous who were reached by e-mail and online chat services and who asked for anonymity in discussing activity that could be illegal. Independent Internet security analysts confirmed the accounts.

Amazon.com, MasterCard, Visa and PayPal are among the other commercial sites that, after halting their dealings with WikiLeaks, have been struggling with overwhelming demands for access that have crashed or drastically slowed their sites.

Some governmental sites have also been hit. On Friday, Dutch prosecutors said their Web site had been overwhelmed in attacks they connected to their arrest of a 16-year-old in The Hague on Thursday, Reuters reported. The police said the teenager had admitted to aiding in the attacks on MasterCard and Visa. He has been ordered to spend 13 days in custody while the case is being examined, according to Reuters.

The attackers — operating by the thousands behind the shroud of the Internet — are rallying behind Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks as champions of freedom of information, and are defying those who they believe are influenced by the American government to halt the disclosures of classified documents.

That belief appears to be broadening, despite denials from the companies, the American government and the Swedish prosecutors seeking to question Mr. Assange on accusations of sexual coercion.

An international Internet security company, Imperva, said Friday that until Tuesday there had been less than 1,000 daily downloads of the Anonymous software used against Moneybookers and in other attacks. That was when Mr. Assange was jailed in Britain on an extradition warrant in the Swedish case. The number of downloads then leaped to about 10,000 a day, most coming from the United States, it said.

The United States government has been looking into ways to pursue prosecutions over the leaks, and on Friday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that the Justice Department was investigating the Web attacks as well, Reuters reported.

But Mr. Holder also added to the denials that American pressure was behind the moves against Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks, telling reporters in San Francisco, “We have not pressured anybody to do anything.”

Paul Mutton, a Web security analyst with the British firm netcraft, said that the attackers were not being as invisible as they might hope. “Maybe people taking part think they’re just downloading software,” he said, “but they are doing something illegal, and particularly if they have a high-bandwidth Internet connection, they may be found.”

In conversations late Thursday, several of the group’s members said that support for the campaign was growing significantly beyond the 1,000 or so core activists who began it last weekend with the release of two manifestos. Many of the new attackers, they said, are ordinary people using available tools to defend the right to information.

“We’re technically not hackers, though we do have some professionals on board,” one said. “We’re mostly normal people, we have doctors and lawyers and guys who work at McDonald’s.”

He said, “We see WikiLeaks as a litmus test for freedom of speech.”

Previous high-profile campaigns by Anonymous, most notably against the Church of Scientology in 2008 and 2009, put enough infrastructure in place for the group to be able to handle the rush of new supporters, said Gregg Housh, a member of the group who helped instigate that campaign but who disavowed any personal illegal action.

“There are propaganda people and programming people and different groups with different levels of engagement,” he said.

In the campaign in defense of WikiLeaks, those groups are marshaled by five to 10 core members who occupy a private chat room on an Anonymous online forum, according to group members.

 News in: New York Times