LONDON — An American provider of Internet domain names withdrew its service to the WikiLeaks Web site late Thursday after a barrage of attacks by hackers threatened to destabilize its entire system. But by Friday, WikiLeaks was pointing users to versions of its Web site registered in a number of European countries, including Switzerland, Germany, Finland and the Netherlands.
Shortly after the action by EveryDNS.net, which provides domain names for about 500,000 Web sites, the French government began seeking measures to keep the whistle-blowing organization from being hosted in France. The moves follow a decision on Wednesday by Amazon.com Inc. to expel WikiLeaks from its servers. The organization remains on the servers of a Swedish host, Bahnhof.
WikiLeaks appears increasingly engaged in a game of digital Whac-A-Mole as it struggles to stay online after publicizing a huge array of some 250,000 leaked State Department documents relating to American foreign policy around the globe.
The Web infrastructure that supports the organization is deliberately diffuse and difficult to track, with servers spread through many countries in order to insulate the site from hostile states or companies. But cyberattacks and problems with service providers have kept the site and its founder, Julian Assange, moving.
“Since April of this year, our timetable has not been our own; rather it has been one that has centered on the moves of abusive elements of the United States government against us,” Mr. Assange wrote in a discussion on Friday on the Web site of the British newspaper The Guardian. “The threats against our lives are a matter of public record,” he added later, saying he and others who work on WikiLeaks were taking “appropriate precautions.” Mr. Assange is being sought for questioning in connection to alleged sex crimes in Sweden, which he has denied the allegations, and his location was not disclosed.
In a statement on its Web site, EveryDNS.net said it terminated WikiLeaks’ domain name at around 10 p.m., Eastern time for violating its terms of service.
The old domain, WikiLeaks.org, “has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks,” the company said. Such attacks usually involve bombarding a Web site with requests for access, effectively blocking legitimate users, and are designed to make a targeted Web site unavailable. When questioned about similar cyberattacks on Sunday against WikiLeaks, American officials vigorously denied any involvement.
According to WhoIs.com, the new domain, WikiLeaks.ch, is registered to the Swiss branch of the Swedish Pirate Party, a political organization that has previously worked with Mr. Assange.
In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, the Pirate Party’s leader, Rickard Falkvinge, expressed an open offer to host the WikiLeaks site because “our organizations generally share the same values — we value privacy, transparency, democracy and knowledge.” Mr. Falkvinge added that any sharing of Web services between the two organizations would offer “heightened political protection.”
“Any prosecutors will have to target a political party in us, and the price for doing that is much higher,” he said.
WikiLeaks reacted to the domain name switch on its Twitter feed, writing just after midnight on Friday morning: “WikiLeaks.org domain killed by U.S. EveryDNS.net after claimed mass attacks.”
It implored supporters to “keep us strong” and provided a link for financial donations. Hours later, a message on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed said: “WikiLeaks moved to Switzerland” and provided the new Web address. By early Friday afternoon, the organization was directing its Twitter followers to more European domain hosts: Finland, Germany and the Netherlands.
In France, Industry Minister Eric Besson asked the French government on Friday to explore measures to “ensure that it is no longer hosted in France” after reports surfaced that WikiLeaks has servers there, according to news reports. “France cannot host an internet site that violates the secrecy of diplomatic relations and endangers people,” Mr. Besson said.
The organization appeared to have moved some of its digital infrastructure from Amazon servers to a French Web hosting company early on Thursday morning. The company, OVH, said it had learned that WikiLeaks was making use of its services only “in the press,” noting that the use of the server space had cost WikiLeaks less than $200.
“OVH is neither for nor against this site,” wrote Octave Klaba, the company’s director, in a message posted to OVH’s website Friday. “It is not the place of the political world nor of OVH to request or decide the closure, or not, of a site, but the place of the justice system.” Mr. Klaba said the company would call for a ruling on the legality, under French law, of the hosting of WikiLeaks.
Earlier this week, Amazon — which rents server space to companies in addition to its online retail business — canceled its relationship with WikiLeaks after inquiries from an aide to Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut. The company said the organization was violating the terms of service for the program.
“When companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others, it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere,” the company said.
Anna Mossberg, Bahnhof’s chief executive, said her company held “two physical WikiLeaks servers in our data hall in Stockholm.” Those servers, she said, have been attacked in recent weeks, though Bahnhof has come under no overt government pressure to abandon them. “But I know we are not the only provider of WikiLeaks’ servers — they are everywhere.”
By: Ravi Somaiya & David Goodman (NY times)
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