Just two days after Julian Assange was arrested on Thursday, a large number of government websites have been hacked. According to Gateway Pundit's Cassandra Fairbanks, who was in London last week, the sites affected include the official website of Ecuador, the Central Bank of Ecuador, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ecuadorian Embassy in the UK.
A hacking group, known as “AL1NE3737,” released a database containing the full names and passwords of 728 Ecuadorian government employees alongside the breach, while according to DefCon Lab, several sites in the Ecuadorian region were hit with Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
Fairbanks said the attack was reminiscent of 2010’s “Operation Avenge Assange,” which began with a broader effort called “Operation Payback.” The hackers targeted companies like PayPal, PostFinance, Mastercard, Visa and others that had blocked WikiLeaks from their services with a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack.
Following Assange's arrest last week, more than 70 MPs and their counterparts signed a letter calling on the British secretary of state to ensure that the WikiLeaks founder is extradited to Sweden if requested by Swedish authorities. Sweden is currently considering whether to restart a previously suspended investigation into allegations of rape and sexual assault against Assange.
For their part, the United States accuses Assange of the largest leak of government secrets in 2010, after the Justice Department claims that the WikiLeaks founder helped a former US military intelligence analyst crack the Department of Defense code using Linux.
“The indictment alleges that in March 2010, Assange conspired with Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst, to help the latter crack a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S. government network used for classified documents and communications,” according to a press release.
The materials Manning released included videos of various US airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the “Iraq War Diaries” and the “Afghan War Diary.”.
Assange faces five years in prison if convicted in the Manning case.
