WikiLeaks' site back with Swiss name after cyber attacks

I / Paris December 03, 2010, 17:58 IST

Whistleblower website WikiLeaks came back online with a Swiss name today around six hours after its wikileaks.Org domain name was shut down because it was suffering massive cyber attacks.

"WikiLeaks moves to Switzerland," the group declared on Twitter, although an Internet trace of the new domain name suggested that the site itself is still hosted in Sweden and in France.

Webusers accessing the wikileaks.Ch address are directed to a page under the URL http://213.251.145.96/ -- which gives them access to the former site, including a massive trove of leaked US diplomatic traffic.

A separate search via the whois.Net tool indicated that the wikileaks.Ch site name is owned by the Swiss Pirates Party, which campaigns for data privacy and Internet freedoms. It was not immediately available to comment.

WikiLeaks has come under repeated cyber attacks since it began on Sunday publishing more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables, many of them "secret", that the website is thought to have obtained from a disaffected US soldier.

The cyber attacks have come on top of broadsides from governments around the world after diplomats were left red-faced by the often unflattering revelations in the massive leak of US State Department cables.

US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has described the leak as "an attack on the world" and on Thursday expressed her regret to Argentine President Cristina Kirchner and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari over their content.

The original wikileaks.Org domain was taken offline at 0300 GMT Friday by its American domain name system provider, EveryDNS.Net, following reports of massive attacks on the site.

"The interference at issue arises from the fact that wikileaks.Org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks," EveryDNS.Net said in a statement.