WikiLeaks: Now It's A CyberWar (and MasterCard Just Became a Casualty)

For later updates, please see Thursday's story.

UPDATE 2305 GMT: Twitter has just suspended the account of the hackers Anonymous.

UPDATE 2255 GMT: Looks like former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin wants to get in on the act. She is e-mailing journalists that, as she is a dedicated foe of WikiLeaks, her website and her credit card information has been targeted by Operation Payback.

UPDATE 2145 GMT: This now appears to be a cyber-bloodbath. The site for Anonymous --- the hackers who have taken on Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Senator Joe Lieberman, and the Swiss bank who dropped Wikileaks account --- is down.

UPDATE 2120 GMT: Just over an hour ago, the hackers' group Anonymous put out the alert that Visa was the next target in Operation Payback:

TARGET: WWW.VISA.COM | TR:10 MINS. GET YOUR WEAPONS READY...#ddos #wikiealsk #payback

Boing Boing reported just after 2100 GMT that Visa's website was now unavailable.

(We briefly got access to the Visa Europe site at 2115 but have had no success in the last 30 minutes.)

UPDATE 1715 GMT: MasterCard Worldwide has confirmed that cardholders were experiencing service interruptions as the "MasterCard Directory Server" went down Wednesday morning: 

Please be advised that MasterCard SecureCode Support has detected a service disruption to the MasterCard Directory Server.

The Directory Server service has been failed over to a secondary site however customers may still be experiencing intermittent connectivity issues. More information on the estimated time of recovery will be shared in due course.

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As if the actual documents released by WikiLeaks were not enough, the drama around the website has escalated in recent days. The head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has been arrested in London, and a series of high-profile firms --- Amazon, PayPal, Mastercard, and Switzerland Post Finance --- have withdrawn their services, probably as a result of pressure, from the website.

But the battle is not one-way. Anonymous, a group of hackers linked to the Internet discussion board 4Chan, took down the site of the Swiss bank soon after its suspension of the WikiLeaks account. This morning, as "Operation Payback" escalates, they have captured a bigger opponent: MasterCard is off-line. 

Meanwhile, the credit-card provider is not exactly getting sympathy in cyber-space. Wags have reworked its long-running slogan: " Freedom Of Expression Is Priceless. For Everything Else, There's MasterCard."