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MasterCard and a Swiss bank that attempted to cut ties with Wikileaks are apparently feeling the wrath of a group of hackers claiming to have shut down each company's site.
December 8
As MasterCard Inc.'s website remains inaccessible, users of its SecureCode payment verification system are also experiencing problems.
The British online transaction company SecureTrading said Wednesday that it has received notice that MasterCard's SecureCode online card-security protocols are being disrupted.
Ian Cushion, the marketing and sales manager for SecureTrading, said his company was notified by the Purchase, N.Y., payments network that the transactions were being disrupted.
He said those outages have been happening throughout the day.
"It doesn't mean a huge amount for us," Cushion said. "It's an outage at the moment."
Hackers have claimed credit for knocking out mastercard.com in an apparent denial-of-service attack, which is a method of making a website inaccessible by overwhelming it with more access requests than it is designed to handle. The hackers said the attack was retaliation for MasterCard's decision to sever its relationship with Wikileaks after Wikileaks published a large number of classified documents.
MasterCard said Wednesday that its website was receiving heavy traffic but did not explicitly say it was the target of a denial-of-service attack. A MasterCard spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on the issue with SecureCode, though the company said earlier that the issues with its website did not affect payments.
