WikiLeaks absorbs more DDoS attacks

WikiLeaks appears to have recovered from another punishing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack unleashed against the whistleblower website.

Attackers began lobbing DDoS assaults at WikiLeaks.org on Sunday, upon news that the site would begin publishing a cache of confidential U.S. Embassy cables containing revelations about the government's foreign activities.

WikiLeaks hosted the cables at cablegate.wikileaks.org, which itself was subjected to similar attacks on Monday and Tuesday, according to Netcraft. Then, the attacks again targeted the main WikiLeaks site.

"The attackers may have diverted their efforts toward attacking www.wikileaks.org, as this is likely to be the first port of call for many of the site's visitors," wrote Paul Mutton, internet services developer at Netcraft, in a Tuesday blog post.

WikiLeaks, in a tweet Tuesday morning EST, said the site was succumbing to traffic "exceeding 10 gigabits a second."

Both WikiLeaks and the cable site appeared to be operating normally by Tuesday afternoon EST. The latest assaults appeared to originate from IP addresses in Russia and Thailand, according to a blog post from security firm Arbor Networks.

Security experts said the DDoS attacks appeared to be nothing more than political "hacktivism" and that, even if visitors were unable to access WikiLeaks, the documents still were published at many other media sites.