4chan rushes to WikiLeaks' defense, forces Swiss banking site offline
The forces of Anonymous have taken aim at several companies who are refusing to do business with WikiLeaks. 4chan's hordes have launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against PayPal, Swiss bank PostFinance …
Context & Ripple Effects
Within days of PayPal cutting off WikiLeaks' donation channel — with a PayPal VP telling TechCrunch the State Department had called the move illegal — the payments blockade widened across cards and banks, and the Guardian reported MasterCard's site partially frozen in what it called 'revenge'. The retaliation came from 4chan's Anonymous collective, whose distributed denial-of-service tooling turned consumer-grade volunteers into an offensive force.
First-order effects
- Swiss bank PostFinance's online banking site is knocked offline by Anonymous' DDoS attack, disrupting its own customers to punish the institution for refusing business to WikiLeaks.
- PayPal, already facing a public backlash for its cutoff, now absorbs direct attack traffic alongside MasterCard's partially degraded site.
Second-order effects
- Other financial firms considering WikiLeaks bans must price in retaliation risk: the Guardian's reporting on MasterCard shows the cost of joining the blockade is no longer just reputational but operational.
- WikiLeaks' funding problem pushes it toward alternative channels — syndicated TechCrunch Europe coverage notes it continues raising money through the startup Flattr while mainstream processors close.
Third-order effects
- If every corporate refusal to serve WikiLeaks now triggers volunteer DDoS campaigns, companies will start treating political deplatforming decisions as security events, not PR ones — and Anonymous establishes itself as a standing enforcement arm outside any legal framework.
The trend: Payment-network politics are colliding with decentralized hacktivism, as infrastructure refusals to WikiLeaks draw crowd-sourced retaliation that no single company or regulator controls.