Wikileaks helps Amazon.com
The two major Internet related stories that are widespread at present are the Stuxnet virus/trojan/malware and Wikileaks. The story of Stuxnet is absolutely remarkable and it (the trojan) is quite unlike anything we have seen before; its sophistication and capabilities are truly ground-breaking.
As for Wikileaks, there is little new that I can add as the whole affair is evolving constantly (and is so widely reported). Of particular curiosity however is how engaged people have become from both sides; those that support Julian Assange and Wikileaks and those that oppose their whistle-blowing. Some hardcore supporters of Wikileaks have become militant and have attempted (and succeeded in some cases) to ‘bring down’ the Web Sites of organizations that have withdrawn services from Wikileaks. These organizations include Amazon, PayPal, Mastercard and Visa Financial Services.
Unfortunately for the electronic ‘warfare’ being directed by these Wikileaks supporters is the concept of unintended consequences; their DDOS attacks resulted in Amazon.com getting some extremely favorable publicity. What happened is that the Wikileaks support group attempted to make unusable the amazon.com Website by flooding it with massive amounts of visits (a distributed denial-of-service / DDOS ‘attack’). Unfortunately for the attackers they didn’t count on the incredible resilience and massive computing power and bandwidth that amazon.com has available through it’s popular Amazon Web Services (AWS).
One thing that the DDOS attacks proved is that if you want a very resilient Content Delivery Network (CDN) or Online storage solution for your WordPress Website then the Amazon AWS is a great way to go!
