'Cyberattack' cripples WikiLeaks

The WikiLeaks website crashed early today in an apparent cyberattack after the accelerated publication of tens of thousands of once-secret US State Department cables by the anti-secrecy organisation raised new concerns about the exposure of confidential American embassy sources.

“WikiLeaks.org is presently under attack,” the group said on Twitter. An hour later, the site and the cables posted there were inaccessible.

WikiLeaks later updated its Twitter account to say that it was “still under a cyberattack” and directed followers to search for cables on a mirror site or a separate search system, cablegatesearch.net.

The apparent cyberattack comes after current and former American officials said the recently-released cables – and concerns over the protection of sources – are creating a fresh source of diplomatic setbacks and embarrassment for the Obama administration.

The Associated Press reviewed more than 2,000 of the cables recently released by WikiLeaks. They contained the identities of more than 90 sources who had sought protection and whose names the cable authors had asked to protect.

Officials said the disclosure in the past week of more than 125,000 sensitive documents by WikiLeaks, far more than it had earlier published, further endangered informants and jeopardised US foreign policy goals. The officials would not comment on the authenticity of the leaked documents but said the rate and method of the new releases, including about 50,000 in one day alone, presented new complications.

“The United States strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of classified information,” US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

“In addition to damaging our diplomatic efforts, it puts individuals’ security at risk, threatens our national security and undermines our effort to work with countries to solve shared problems. We remain concerned about these illegal disclosures and about concerns and risks to individuals.

“We continue to carefully monitor what becomes public and to take steps to mitigate the damage to national security and to assist those who may be harmed by these illegal disclosures to the extent that we can,” she told reporters.

Neither Ms Nuland nor other current officials would comment on specific information contained in the compromised documents or speculate on whether any harm caused by the new releases would exceed that caused by the first series of leaks, which began in November and sent the administration into a damage-control frenzy.

WikiLeaks hit back at the criticism even as its website came under cyberattack.

“Dear governments, if you don’t want your filth exposed, then stop acting like pigs. Simple,” the group posted on Twitter.

Some officials noted that the first releases had been vetted by media organisations which scrubbed them to remove the names of contacts that could be endangered. The latest documents have not been vetted in the same way.

“It’s picking at an existing wound. There is the potential for further injury,” said PJ Crowley, the former assistant secretary of state for public affairs who resigned this year after criticising the military’s treatment of the man suspected of leaking the cables to WikiLeaks.

“It does have the potential to create further risk for those individuals who have talked to US diplomats. It has the potential to hurt our diplomatic efforts and it once again puts careers at risk.”

Mr Crowley set up a crisis management team at the State Department to deal with the matter and said officials at the time went through the entire collection of documents they believed had been leaked and warned as many named sources as possible, particularly in authoritarian countries, that their identities could be revealed.

A handful of them were relocated, but Mr Crowley said others may have been missed and some could not be contacted because the effort would have increased the potential for exposure.

The new releases “could be used to intimidate activists in some of these autocratic countries”, he said. He said he believed that “any autocratic security service worth its salt” would probably already have the complete unredacted archive of cables but added that the new WikiLeaks releases meant that any intelligence agency that did not “will have it in short order”.

WikiLeaks insisted it was “totally false” that any WikiLeaks sources had been exposed and appeared to suggest the group itself was not even responsible for releasing unredacted cables.

The group seemed to taunt US officials and detractors in yet another Twitter message, asking what they would do “when it is revealed which mainstream news organisation disclosed all 251k unredacted cables”.

The AP review included all cables classified as “confidential” or “secret” among the more than 50,000 recently released by WikiLeaks. In them, the AP found the names of at least 94 sources whose identities the cable authors asked higher-ups to “protect” or “strictly protect”. Several thousand other of the recently-published cables were not classified and did not appear to put sources in jeopardy.

The accelerated flood of publishing partly reflects the collapse of the unusual relationships between WikiLeaks and news organisations that previously were co-operating with it in exchange for being given copies of all the uncensored State Department messages.