Finextra has this story:
Between 12pm and 2pm, visitors to the MasterCard Website were timed out, indicating a massive distributed denial of service attack on the card group.
The broadside against MasterCard opens up a new front in the ongoing battle between underground hacking rings and large corporate interests.
The latest assault comes six months after hackers, loosely organised under the ‘Anonymous’ umbrella, successfully disrupted the Internet operations of a clutch of international payments groups in retaliation for cutting off payments to Wikileaks.
More recently, the underground movement has appeared more concerned with exposing defective security precautions on corporate sites, dumping account names and other data on the public Web. But the strike against MasterCard comes just a week after now-disbanded hacking collective LulzSec signalled a change in direction, announcing plans to partner with Anonymous on a new campaign dubbed Operation Anti-Security, targeting banks and governmental agencies.
The humbling of MasterCard was posted on Twitter by Wikileaks, with an accompanying statement which named Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Bank of America, and Western Union as the chief ‘culprits’ in an ‘unlawful banking blockade’ against the company.
WikiLeaks says the strangling of fund raising has so far cost it $15 million in lost revenue, and is urging supporters to use the alternative currency Bitcoin to make donations.