Wikileaks hit by 10Gbps DDoS attack

Wikileaks said it was under another distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack today.

The controversial site, which began releasing classified communications between government officials and diplomats two days ago, said it was under siege again following an attack on Sunday.

"We are currently under another DDoS attack," the site's official Twitter feed read.

"DDoS attack now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second."

If the 10Gbps figure - relating to the speed at which traffic goes through a site - was correct, this would be over double the power of Sunday's attacks, which registered at 2-4 Gbps, according to network security specialist Arbor Networks.

The security firm's chief scientist Craig Labovitz said the initial DDoS effort "was modest in the relative scheme of recent attacks against large web sites."

"While the DDoS attack generated an outpouring of blog posts, news articles and tweets, it appears to have had little impact on the Wikileaks 'Cablegate' disbursement of documents," Labovitz said in a blog.

A hacker known as Jester claimed to have been responsible for the initial attack, but there has not been any confirmation on the perpetrator of today's efforts.

At the time of writing, Wikileaks' sites were up and running.

Today, the site leaked communications indicating ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown called on the US to allow hacker Gary Mckinnon serve any potential sentence in the UK.

Yesterday, another leak emerged implicating China in a hack on Google.