If Wikileaks Can be Attacked, So Can You

by don | Dec 21, 2010

Do you think your site is immune from vicious or just plain juvenile cyber attacks?

Think again.

Just look at what’s happened to Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing site that has got the whole diplomatic world in an uproar over its posting of more than 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables from around the world. The memos contain information on US diplomatic relations and military activities.

Since publishing those documents, the Wikileaks website has been under attack. In fact, EveryDNS.net, a domain name provider, recently cut off service to Wikileaks because it said Wikileaks had come under massive cyberattacks.

I guess that’s what happens when you put yourself out there as an aggressive  information-disseminating organization, and one that goes against the established rules of journalism! You’re going to get noticed — not just by the worldwide media — but also hackers.

Wikileaks fans need not worry, though. It has since changed its web address to a Swiss address, and is using Twitter to tell fans to use its raw web address (live IP numbers versus “www” web domains).

The story about Wikileaks’s troubles reminded me, though, that you’re never really truly safe on the web (I mean, just think how the U.S. government feels!). A great insurance policy is to use a monitoring service that tracks activity on your servers and networks – all from the cloud (because you still want it to work even if your network goes down).

And then you’ll want instant notification of site problems.  Let’s face it, nobody likes bad news, but it’s better than not being alerted at all.  That’s Paid Monitor has made our alert system media-independent.  You can get your alerts in the following ways:

• Live-Voice (new) – we’ll call you at the number of your choice anytime, day or night
• Email – we allow to send unlimited emails. Also weekly and daily SLA and performance reports.
• SMS (short messages)
• IM (instant messengers, including ICQ, Google Talk)
• Twitter
• URL callback (new)
• Notification rules

Cloud-based technology like Paid Monitor will provide the surest, most reliable coverage and alert you of emerging problems that need immediate attention, even when your network is down!