WikiLeaks: Hackers Fight Back Against 'Enemies' of Julian Assange

Computer hackers sympathetic to jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange struck back Wednesday at Swedish prosecutors, the Swedish lawyer whose clients have accused him of sexual misconduct and also the Swiss authority that froze Assange's bank account.

MasterCard, which ended its relationship with WikiLeaks, also was under cyber-attack, according the Guardian newspaper in London.

The "online vengeance" campaign, as the Associated Press called it, was apparently orchestrated by a loose network of Web activists calling themselves "Anonymous," Symantec security specialist Per Hellqvist told the news agency. It came a day after Assange was arrested in London on a European warrant.

He is being held there without bail pending an extradition request from Sweden, where two women have accused the 39-year-old Australian of rape, molestation and unlawful coercion. But Assange denies their claims and is fighting extradition.

The hackers said they "don't have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, [but] we fight for the same reasons." The statement from "Anonymous" said, "We want transparency and we counter censorship." It was not clear which of the multiple attacks originated with the group.

The cyber-actions took the form of "denial of service" attacks in which computers are harnessed, sometimes surreptitiously, to jam websites with mountains of requests for data.

Since it began releasing batches of more than 200,000 State Department cables last week, WikiLeaks has seen its business relationships with MasterCard, Visa and PayPal -- through which donations to the site are made -- severed. And hackers hostile to WikiLeaks have attacked the whistleblower site too.

The U.S. government denounced the publication of the confidential documents as a national security threat and opened a criminal investigation to determine how they were obtained.