WikiLeaks repels DDoS attacks, returns online

WikiLeaks is back online after absorbing punishing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for nine straight days.

The attacks came at a particularly inopportune time for the news organization, which recently published a new batch of emails detailing a wide-ranging government surveillance program known as TrapWire that is in use in cities across the country. Millions of emails were handed over to WikiLeaks earlier this year after online activist collective Anonymous last December hacked global intelligence firm Stratfor.

A group calling itself AntiLeaks has taken credit for the DDoS attacks, saying they were launched out of opposition for WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange seeking political asylum in Ecuador.

But accessibility to WikiLeaks.org appeared to immediately return after it signed up Monday afternoon for services with CloudFlare, a San Francisco start-up, said the company's co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince. Its primary offerings are free.

In a video interview in June with SCMagazine.com, Prince described CloudFlare as a "giant reverse proxy" that relies on more than 20 data centers across the world. Traffic to its customers' websites first past through the CloudFlare network before directing to the origin server.

"And we can clean and accelerate that traffic as it passes through, so that if a hacker is trying to hack your site, they actually get stopped by us at the edge of our network and it never gets to your data center, making sure you're as fast and safe as possible," he said.

"Is that all your've got?" WikiLeaks tweeted Monday. "Keep attacking. Our skin just gets harder."