MasterCard downed by ISP - not hackers - company says

by Steve Ragan - Jun 30 2011, 07:00

On Tuesday, MasterCard.com was offline, and shortly after the outage was noticed by the public, someone on Twitter claimed credit. In a statement, MasterCard blamed the outage on an ISP issue, without discounting that they were attacked upstream.

It was shortly after MasterCard went down that someone on Twitter, known as ibomhacktivist, promoted “MasterCard.com DOWN!!!”, adding the site was down for messing with WikiLeaks and Anonymous.

Late last year, when the company announced that they would no longer allow customers to donate to WikiLeaks by charging their MasterCards, they faced a wall of public outrage, some support, and the wrath of Anonymous, who targeted them as part of Operation: Payback.

After Tuesday’s outage gained popular attention, there was talk in the media that Anonymous had struck again, or that the tweet from ibomhacktivist was confirmation that MasterCard was the latest AntiSec target.

"MasterCard's corporate, public-facing Website experienced intermittent service disruption, due to a telecommunications/Internet Service Provider outage that impacted multiple users," spokeswoman Jennifer Stalzer said in an email to the media.

“It is important to note that no cardholder data has been impacted and that cardholders can continue to use their cards securely. We are continuing to monitor the situation closely."

MasterCard.com was operational Tuesday afternoon, but the outage lasted several hours. While the statement addresses the outage, it makes no mention of the chance a DDoS attack could have been the cause.

In the past, targeting upstream hosting has been a method leveraged by groups using DDoS to take a site offline. If other sites are caught in the crossfire, that’s hardly the attacker’s concern. 

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