MasterCard struggling under weight of hack attack

 

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 8 Dec 2010 at 16:07

MasterCard is under a denial of service attack as hackers fight back against companies that have cut ties with whistle-blowing site Wikileaks.

Hacker group Anonymous claimed responsibility for the latest DDOS action.

While the credit card company has said problems reaching its website were down to heavy traffic, and that no payments services had been affected, transaction companies transaction companies beg to differ.

“MasterCard SecureCode is currently down,” said Ian Cushion of online transaction company SecureTrading in a blog post. “This means that all MasterCard and Maestro transactions cannot be processed via 3-D Secure. This is affecting all payment service providers and is not SecureTrading specific.”

According to Cushion, in such a situation payments can still be processed, but traders may face higher charges because they cannot use the 3-D Secure option, which is generally cheaper.

When we called the company for more information, a MasterCard employee repeated the line that the website was “still accessible, but experiencing heavy traffic” despite the fact that the website was down at the time of the conversation.

The company went on to tell us that no transactions were being affected. We are awaiting an official response from the company.

The Anonymous hacker group has also targeted PayPal for cutting off a Wikileaks donation account. The online payments service has since said it was told by the US State Department that Wikileaks was illegal and its account should be shut down.