PayPal hit by DDoS attack after dropping Wikileaks

PayPal was hit by a denial-of-service attack on Sunday that took its blog offline for about eight hours, according to security researchers.

The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks came in response to a move by the payment giant to stop providing services to whistleblower website Wikileaks for donations. PayPal said Wikileaks had breached its user policies, which prevent its services from being used to support criminal activity. Wikileaks has been severely criticized for its decision to leak more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables.

"ThePayPalBlog.com is now back up after 75 service interruptions and 8 hours 15 minutes of total downtime. This report doesn't take into account the many hours that ThePayPalBlog.com resolved to a 403 error," PandaBlogs researcher Sean-Paul Correll said in a blog post.

For more on this story, read PayPal suffers DoS for spurning Wikileaks on ZDNet Australia.