MasterCard has acknowledged interruption of its payment services after it was hacked yesterday, while Visa became the latest payment service to be attacked by cyber-raiders overnight.
MasterCard’s corporate website went down after hackers from the group Anonymous carried out a denial of service attack (DDOS) yesterday.
The group of hackers is opposed to the refusal of payment companies to process donations to whistleblower website WikiLeaks and has threatened PayPal and Amazon, which withdrew hosting of WikiLeaks’ site.
Technology news service Next Web has reported today that the PayPal website is down, potentially the result of another DDOS attack, and that PayPal has also decided to allow payments to go through to the WikiLeaks account once more.
Mastercard insisted yesterday payment services had not been affected by the hacking but has since released a statement saying it experienced limited interruption of some web-based services.
The Times reported that last’s night attack on Visa would potentially have led to problems for etailers such Amazon and Asos. The payments issues come at a critical time for online retailers, in the middle of the run up to Christmas.
MasterCard said: “MasterCard has made significant progress in restoring full service to its corporate website.
“Our core processing capabilities have not been compromised and cardholder account data has not been placed at risk.
“While we have seen limited interruption in some web-based services, cardholders can continue to use their cards for secure transactions globally.”
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