WikiLeaks’ website has been removed by EveryDNS.net, the company which provided its domain name service (DNS). This followed Amazon ceasing hosting the whistle-blowing site.
According to a statement of its site, the services were terminated due to “the fact that wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.”
Within EveryDNSnet’s terms of service, it states that members cannot interfere with another member’s use of the services.
The DNS provider said that Wikileaks breaks this term, as these attacks and future attacks threaten their infrastructure and prevent access for its other sites.
The service that EveryDNS.net provided was the translated website name into an IP quad. Without this DNS, the site can only be reached through an IP address.
WikiLeaks confirmed this removal on its Twitter page. The site can now be accessed through http://wikileaks.ch/.
‘Folks need to go operate somewhere else’
The whistle-blowing website has been subjected to DDOS attacks all week. This lead to the site being hosted on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service, but they it was removed from this, as well.
There was speculation as to whether Amazon’s removal was due to pressure from the US government or that the site was removed due to the vast quantity of DDOS attacks on WikiLeaks. Amazon denied both of these claims in a blog post, saying the site was removed because it posted data that was not theirs which could harm others.
“There were several parts (of the terms of services that Wikileaks) were violating,” said Amazon.
“For example, our terms of service state that ‘you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content … that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.’ It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content.
“Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy.
“Human rights organisations have in fact written to WikiLeaks asking them to exercise caution and not release the names or identities of human rights defenders who might be persecuted by their governments,” said Amazon.
While Amazon said it was aware that users of its services would post controversial data, the company said it believed that when people “go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere.”
This was in spite of Amazon previously hosting WikiLeaks’ past released confidential data, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs. WikiLeaks is not being hosted on European servers.
