WikiLeaks has asked the Web community to open mirror sites so it cannot be downed or censored and said Monday that 355 new sites are already up.
“Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack,” the group said on its website. “In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, we need your help.”
The site is asking people with Unix-based servers and excess hosting resources to answer its call. WikiLeaks’ entire website “should not take more than a couple of GB at the moment,” it said.
Mirror sites are additional websites that have all of the same information as the original site and are updated automatically each time the original site adds new content. WikiLeaks hopes the new sites can ensure the survival of the mass of leaked documents, videos and other data it has collected and published.
Last Friday, the controversial website could not be accessed through its WikiLeaks.org domain name after EveryDNS.net terminated its domain name service over repeated DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks against WikiLeaks. The U.S.-based service provider said it did provide prior notice. The move came just days after Amazon Web Services stopped hosting WikiLeaks on its servers for breaking user rules saying that websites must use their own content and not carry data that might injure others. The U.S. Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Senator Joe Lieberman, had also asked Amazon to stop hosting the controversial website.
WikiLeaks has come under fire for publishing classified U.S. documents, including videos and documents from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as sensitive cables sent between U.S. embassies and the U.S. State Department. WikiLeaks continues to post the cables.
WikiLeaks has faced a number of DDOS attacks, designed to knock out access to the website. WikiLeaks.org appears to still be offline. New links to WikiLeaks from the company’s Twitter feed are going to WikiLeaks.ch.
Netcraft, which tracks web attacks, shows in a series of graphs that WikiLeaks.org has been down since last Friday.