WikiLeaks says its supporters are responsible for Friday's huge cyberattack
WikiLeaks said its supporters are responsible for the massive cyberattack Friday which took down numerous major websites, including The New York Times, Twitter, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, Comcast, and more. "Mr. Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing," the organization wrote to hackers involved in the incident in a tweet Friday afternoon, asking for the widespread denial of service attacks to cease.
Also Friday afternoon, hacktivist groups Anonymous and New World confirmed the tweet's implications, saying they orchestrated the attack as retaliation for the Ecuadorian government's decision to take away internet access from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange following his site's ongoing release of emails hacked from the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are investigating the attacks.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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