Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

MasterCard blames ISP outage for site's downtime

A weather-related issue at a third-party ISP caused the site to briefly go offline

MasterCard said on Wednesday that its main website was offline for a short period of time due to a weather-related issue at a third-party ISP and not a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack as claimed by WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that "hacktivists" had taken down MasterCard "over the continuing WikiLeaks fiscal embargo." An anonymous Twitter user, "ibombhacktivistm," wrote that MasterCard.com had been taken down.

A MasterCard spokesman said that the "cause was not a hack."

MasterCard's main website came under attack last year by Anonymous. The distributed collective of hackers also conducted DDOS attacks against the websites of PayPal, Visa, and the Swiss Bank PostFinance after those companies stopped processing payments for WikiLeaks when it began releasing portions of 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables in November 2010.

The outage of MasterCard.com on Tuesday was sudden and abrupt, which is not a common pattern for how DDOS attacks progress, said Paul Mutton, a security analyst with Netcraft, on Wednesday.

"Most DDOS attacks we witness also result in longer response times during at least some part of the attack, which we did not see during the MasterCard outage," Mutton said. "It was either responding quickly, or not at all."

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Mastercard, Netcraft, PayPal, Visa
References show all

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: MasterCard International, security
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Mastering Backup and Restoration
    A backup strategy should not be static. Rather, it should establish a platform for a business to deliver continuous improvement through faster backup and restore features, easier management, lower operating expenditure, reduced complexity and delayed capital investment. These will in turn support greater business competitiveness. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • There is a HP Printer for everyone
    The following printer categories are highly recommended for the respective customer segments. While these printer categories remain as the primary recommendations, you will find alternative models listed in the product line up charts.
    Learn more »
  • High Availability with Oracle Database 11g Release 2
    In this paper, we review the common causes of application downtime and discuss how technologies available in the Oracle Database can help avoid costly downtime and enable rapid recovery from unplanned failures and also minimize impact from planned outages. We also highlight new technologies introduced in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 that enable businesses to make their IT infrastructure even more robust and fault tolerant, maximize their return on investment on high availability infrastructure, and provide better quality of service to users.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments