Image via Wikipedia
Payback, the hacker operation that shut down Mastercard’s website for cutting off Wikileaks has its own Facebook and Twitter accounts shut down.Payback used Twitter and Facebook to claim responsibility for the shut down. The group said on both Facebook and Twitter that it was using a distributed denial of service attack, also known as a DDOS attack, to bring down Mastercard’s website.
DDOS attacks overload a website’s servers by sending an inordinate amount of requests for information that results in a site being unable to operate.
Twitter officials could not be reached for comment, but Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes e-mailed this statement:
“We take our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities seriously and react quickly to reports of inappropriate or illegal content and behavior. In this case, we removed a page because it was promoting a DDOS attack.
“Additional point: The WikiLeaks page on Facebook does not violate our policies and remains up. We haven’t received any official requests to disable it, nor any notification that the articles posted on the page contain unlawful content.”
source: http://www.webguild.org/20101209/twitter-facebook-shut-down-wikileaks-hacker-group