Securing the Clicks Network Security in the Age of Social Media

Case Study: A Dangerous Public

In December 2010, a group of hackers took aim at Mastercard.com’s website and launched a denial of service (Dos) attack that took the website offline. The activists launched their denial of service attack to show support for WikiLeaks and WikiLeak’s founder Julian Assange. WikiLeaks had posted confidential documents about a number of governments and corporations, and, as a result, MasterCard decided to stop processing donations to WikiLeaks. The attack was called “Operation Payback.”¹ One credit card payment service reported that it could not process payments because of the attack. Although this attack did not ultimately impact MasterCard’s ability to process credit card transactions, consumers saw how vulnerable ...