Cloud support brings WikiLeaks back online

By Iain Thomson in San Francisco

After being taken out for ten days by a DDoS attack the WikiLeaks site is back online, thanks to some cloudy support from CloudFlare.

The organization said that it had approached CloudFlare about hosting its site, since it has massive capacity and good systems for spotting an blocking DDoS attacks. WikiLeaks said it was originally turned down, but this was due to an error, the hosting company explained in a tweet.

Now WikiLeaks is back online and from the postings the organization is making its mood is combative.

While, what of AntiLeaks, which claims to be responsible for the takedown? The spokesman for the group earlier said that the attacks on the site would continue indefinitely, but the shift to the cloud on Tuesday has caused some problems and the group is working on a way to bring down the WikiLeaks site again.

"WikiLeaks web server is now hidden behind five CloudFlare servers. CloudFlare isn't actually hosting WikiLeaks content itself but acts as a reverse web proxy. This makes it especially difficult to attack WikiLeaks, as each CloudFlare server can handle 10gb/second," AntiLeaks spokesman DietPepsi said in an email to El Reg.

"I am in the process of finding the actual IP address of WikiLeaks web server. I have a couple of leads and believe I will be able to do it, however it will take some time."

In the meantime there's been considerable kerfuffle over the fate of Julian Assange's future.

The UK's Guardian newspaper reported on Tuesday that the Ecuadorian government has decided to grant Assange political asylum in their country. Assange is approaching his 60th day trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and a senior government source told the paper that Assange had been cleared.

"We see Assange's request as a humanitarian issue. The contact between the Ecuadorean government and WikiLeaks goes back to May 2011, when we became the first country to see the leaked US embassy cables completely declassified," the official said.

"It is clear that when Julian entered the embassy there was already some sort of deal. We see in his work a parallel with our struggle for national sovereignty and the democratisation of international relations."

However, the story brought a sharp rebuttal from the Ecuadorian president, who said the situation was still being considered. ®