Thfire.com – iNews

President Barack Obama should resign if it can be shown that he approved spying by US diplomatic figures on UN officials, the founder of WikiLeaks said in an interview published Sunday.

President Of US, Guilty of Spying??

“The whole chain of command who was aware of this order, and approved it, must resign if the US is to be seen to be a credible nation that obeys the rule of law. The order is so serious it may well have been put to the president for approval,” Julian Assange told Spanish daily El Pais.

“Obama must answer what he knew about this illegal order and when. If he refuses to answer or there is evidence he approved of these actions, he must resign,” he added during an Internet chat interview published online.

WikiLeaks threw US diplomacy into chaos when it started releasing more than 250,000 classified State Department cables on November 28, creating an international firestorm as American diplomats’ private assessments of foreign leaders and politics have been publicly aired.

According to one of the documents, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked for UN personnel’s telephones, emails, credit card details and frequent flier numbers.

The United States and other governments said the release of the documents broke their laws.

Assange gave the interview to El Pais on Saturday from an undisclosed location. The 39-year-old Australian is believed to be in Britain, and a report said he could be arrested this week.

WikiLeaks has come under intense pressure to close since it began releasing the trove of US State Department cables.

The site has already been forced to change its domain name and hop-scotch to servers around the globe as successive companies and countries bent to US arguments branding its divulgations over the past week “illegal”.

It has also come under repeated cyber-attack, through a tactic known as distributed denial of service (DDoS) in which thousands of computers connect to its servers in a concerted attempt to knock them off-line.

Mirror websites, which replicate WikiLeaks’s data, have sprung up on servers in various countries.

Interpol, meanwhile, has issued a “red notice” against Assange alerting all police forces that he is a wanted person in Sweden, which wants to question him “in connection with a number of sexual offenses”, charges he denies.

“The organisation is strong. We have a lot of support, however we also have many attacks of different forms. From ongoing mass DDoS attacks to smears and the legal issues,” said Assange.

He said WikiLeaks had “dozens” of people who were helping the organisation deal with the cyber-attack and set up the mirror websites “but it takes a lot of time for us to manage the process”.

“We are automating that process and will soon have hundreds. If there is a battle between the US military and the preservation of History, we have insured History will win.”

Assange said he and others who work for WikiLeaks had received “hundreds” of “specific” death threats from “US military militants”.

“That is not unusual, and we have become practiced from past experiences at ignoring such threats from Islamic extremists, African kleptocrats and so on. Recently the situation has changed with these threats now extending to our lawyers and my children,” he added.

Assange said he believed the “ripples are just starting to flow throughout the world” from the release of the State Department cables.

“But I believe geopolitics will be separated into pre and post cablegate phases,” he said.

WikiLeaks has constantly been under the scrutiny of the Governments. This time though it also seems to have been attacked. The DoS attack was launched on its website to stop it from publishing the Diplomatic Documents of the U.S Government.

WikiLeaks website DDoSed

WikiLeaks was hit with a denial-of-service attack as it prepared to publicize a trove of diplomatic documents.

The attack occurred Nov. 28, striking the controversial site before it posted a collection of more than 250,000 U.S. embassy cables online. The main WikiLeaks.org site appeared to bear the brunt of the attack, according to Paul Mutton of Netcraft, who added the site suffered from “patchy or slow availability for several hours.”

“Twitter user th3j35t3r claimed to be carrying out the denial of service attack against www.wikileaks.org, although in a tweet that has since been deleted, th3j35t3r stated that it was not a distributed attack,” Mutton blogged. “If WikiLeaks believed the attack to be distributed, it could suggest that other parties had also been carrying out separate attacks at the same time…th3j35t3r’s Twitter feed lists dozens of other sites that have also been taken down, mainly communicated through “TANGO DOWN” messages posted via the XerCeS Attack Platform.”

According to an analysis by Arbor Networks, the attack began around 10:05 a.m. EST Nov. 28. Shortly after the attack started, Wikileaks redirected DNS from its AS8473 Swedish hosting provider to use mirror sites hosted by a large cloud provider in Ireland (and later the US as well), Arbor found.

“Overall, at 2-4 Gbps the Wikileaks DDoS attack was modest in the relative scheme of recent attacks against large web sites,” blogged Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor Networks. “Though, TCP and application level attacks generally require far lower bps and pps rates to be effective. Engineering mailing list discussion also suggests the hosting provider and upstreams decided to blackhole all Wikileaks traffic rather than transit the DDoS.”

WikiLeaks was blasted during the past 24 hours by U.S. officials, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stating the U.S. government “strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information.”

“This Administration,” she said today, “is advancing a robust foreign policy that is focused on advancing America’s national interests and leading the world in solving the most complex challenges of our time…In every country and in every region of the world, we are working with partners to pursue these aims. So let’s be clear: this disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community – the alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity.”

Among the documents is a cable linking the Chinese government to the Aurora attack that impacted Google, Adobe Systems and dozens of other corporations. The attack was first reported by Google in January, and speculation immediately pointed to China as the culprit.

While the controversy swirls, cablegate.wikileaks.org has so far escaped any significant downtime, Mutton blogged.

“This site has used 3 IP addresses since its launch, probably in anticipation of being attacked or deluged with legitimate traffic,” he wrote. “Two of these IP addresses are at Octopuce in France, which also hosts the single IP address now used by warlogs.wikileaks.org. Ironically, the third IP address being used to distribute secret US embassy cables is an Amazon EC2 instance hosted in – you guessed it – the US.”

Cisco Wireless LAN Exploit

It seems that researchers at AirMagnet, a company dedicated to detection and prevention of intrusion attacks has found out that the Cisco Wireless LAN, very popularly used around the world known for its security and reliability is just not what it claims to be. The researchers have discovered a vulnerability and an exploit that can be used against networks that have the Over-the-Air-Provisioning (OTAP) feature turned on.

“We found it in our labs,” Wade Williamson, director of product management at AirMagnet, said on Monday. “We don’t know about it being exploited in the wild.”

Basically, the Cisco access points generate an unencrypted multicast data frame that is sent over the air and includes unencrypted data like the MAC address and the IP address of the wireless controller, as well as some configuration options, he said. The controller is used to manage the access points.

With that information, someone listening to the network could easily find the internal addresses of the WLAN controllers in the network and potentially target them with a denial-of-service attack, Williamson said.

“Someone out in the parking lot or a neighbor can look at the packets and see information about the controller on the wired side,” he said. “This is giving anybody that’s listening to the environment some pretty detailed information about the wired network that we want to keep protected.”

The researchers have already informed Cisco Systems about the vulnerability and they are working on a fix for it.

Twitter and Facebook the place where bloggers, users hang out was  hacked by hackers for atleast 2 hours this thursday.

Both the Networking sites have not only the users but celebrities , president,sportsperson and many more  Powerful person in the world along with the users.

The hacking was called DOS Denial of service. Though they successfully disrupted the service for few hours, this type of attack wont benefit the hackers in financial way, the experts adds here.

“Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users,” said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on the company’s blog.

The purpose of the attack is unknown but the nearest guess is that, the hackers would have wanted to stop the service for few hours for fun . Or the next possibility can be to show the world how they can tap the biggest site online.

The services resumed in twitter by posting a blog post . Face Book on the other hand reported the crash but said the site was still online.

“No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users,” spokeswoman Brandee Barker told the AFP news agency.

“We’re continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.”

This incident shows us that the hackers can really destroy any type of website.