Wikileaks Claims Credit for the DDoS Attack on the US Internet -- Is it True?

All day, the United States has been experiencing distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS).

There have been numerous theories as to what or who is causing the attacks. But less than an hour ago, Wikileaks released a new one -- it is claiming that its supporters are responsible for taking down the Internet.

New: Wikileaks updates its "Stochastic Terminator" algorithm. What is that? Find out here.

Wikileaks on DDoS: "We ask supporters to stop taking down the US internet"

Wikileaks was mostly quiet today, but at the end of the day they posted this statement:

Essentially, they are claiming that Wikileaks supporters are taking down the Internet because of what has been done to the, They posted another tweet that may be related earlier, saying that: "Heavily armed 'police' appear outside Ecuadorian Embassy in London where Julian Assange has political asylum."

The presumption is that Wikileaks supporters took down the Internet to show their power in order to save Assange.

Meanwhile, others are theorizing the opposite -- the DDoS attack was to take down Wikileaks

At the same time, others are suggesting that this may be a purposeful attack by actors with an interest in the US election who don't want Wikileaks material to be read.

Essentially, they are saying that whoever performed the attack was trying to make it impossible for people to access today's posts on Wikileaks.

This argument makes no sense, as it would make much more sense to take down Wikileaks -- not Amazon, Netflix, etc.

Could this really be Wikileaks supporters performing the DDoS attack?

It definitely could be.

Especially if Wikileaks has some connection to the Russian government, who is definitely capable of performing such an attack.

In order to do an attack like this, you must have planned significantly in advance, because the way these attacks work is that they hijack regular people's computers using a virus or malware, and then that malware waits until the date of the attack to take action and start sending Internet data (packets) to the server that they want to take down.

This makes it unlikely that Wikileaks is right -- for Wikileaks' supporters to have taken down these servers with such heavy traffic, they would need to have hijacked thousands -- possibly hundreds of thousands -- of computers all over the world.

It is unlikely that they could spread malware this widely within days -- or even weeks. It is much more likely that this was a preplanned attack that had nothing to do with Wikileaks and this week's events.

It could, however, be related to the US election.

Did the Obama administration have something to do with this?

Wikileaks just posted another, rather cryptic message:

The Obama administration should not have attempted to misuse its instruments of state to stop criticism of its ruling party candidate.

-- WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 21, 2016

Some are suggesting that this means the Obama administration is behind these attacks due to the statement above.

This doesn't make sense, especially given the first tweet from Wikileaks. It is doubtful that Wikileaks is referring to the DDoS attack in this tweet..

But we will have to wait and see.

Wanna read more on this? Check these out: Explosive: Wikileaks Julian Assange Says "War Is Just Commencing" (more); SHOCKER: Wikileaks Posts Macron Email Leak Docs, Confirmed By Macron Campaign (more); Comey: Wikileaks Is Criminal Because They Don't Call Us Before Publishing (Watch) (more); What's Happening To WikiLeaks? CIA Threatens 'Private Intelligence Service,' Things Heat Up (more).

And here are some more related articles: Wikileaks Releases Explosive #Vault7: Was CIA Hacking Trump's Twitter? (more); Is Pamela Anderson Hooking Up with Wikileaks' Julian Assange? (more); Julian Assange Awaits His Fate As Ecuadorian Elections Enter Runoff (more).

A few more: RIP Wikileaks? Ecuador Elections Could Mean The End For Julian Assange (more); Wikileaks Julian Assange Resurfaces on Twitter - Could #Vault7 be Imminent? (more).