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Activists fighting on behalf of WikiLeaks brought down MasterCard's Web site today, according to the BBC and other sources.

The hacking group Anonymous is taking responsibility for a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the credit company's site in retaliation for MasterCard's decision on Monday to block donations and payments to WikiLeaks, which was first reported by CNET.

MasterCard's main site was at times either offline or extremely slow to load this morning. Ping requests to the site also timed out, an indication that the site was unreachable.

Early this morning, the Anonymous group, which … Read more

MasterCard is pulling the plug on payments to WikiLeaks, a move that will dry up another source of funds for the embattled document-sharing Web site, CNET has learned.

"MasterCard is taking action to ensure that WikiLeaks can no longer accept MasterCard-branded products," a spokesman for MasterCard Worldwide said today.

That further limits the revenue sources for WikiLeaks, which has seen its finances systematically attacked in the last few days, as the Swiss authorities shut down a bank account used by editor Julian Assange, and PayPal permanently restricted the account used by the group. WikiLeaks has responded with an … Read more

Though it's in hot water with the U.S. government, WikiLeaks is being supported by online activists fighting to keep the site alive.

WikiLeaks is being propped up by a barrage of mirror sites created by activists following moves by Amazon to stop hosting its site and Domain Name System provider EveryDNS.net to cut off its DNS services, according to The New York Times. Such mirrors can replicate an entire Web site, ensuring that all content and documents remain online and accessible even if WikiLeaks' own site is taken down.

But some of WikiLeaks supporters are adopting a … Read more

PayPal, the popular online payment service owned by eBay, has "permanently restricted" the account hitherto used in fund-raising efforts by WikiLeaks.

The service posted a short statement about the matter on its blog Friday:

"PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We've notified the account holder of this action."

WikiLeaks, meanwhile, updated its support page, crossing out the PayPal … Read more

With a new survey finding that half of the people polled plan to shop online for the holidays, security company Webroot offers some tips and tricks for staying safe in cyberspace.

Among the more than 2,660 consumers surveyed in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia by Webroot, 55 percent said they do plan to buy at least half of their holiday gifts online, a rise from 38 percent last year. But some of those people also plan to use search engines and public Wi-Fi to purchase those presents, activities that Webroot says could put buyers at risk.… Read more

PayPal rushed a fix out today for its iPhone app after learning that it contained a flaw that could be used by attackers to trick PayPal users into divulging their account information.

The authentication vulnerability in PayPal's iPhone app could have allowed someone to conduct what is called a "man-in-the-middle" attack, PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar told CNET. In such an attack, people who happen to be accessing their PayPal accounts over an unsecured Wi-Fi network could be tricked into thinking they are on the legitimate PayPal site when they aren't.

Only PayPal's iPhone app, which … Read more

The mobile payments race took an interesting turn today with an announcement from VeriFone and PayPal.

VeriFone, the business-focused electronic-payments company, unveiled a partnership that brings eBay-owned PayPal's merchant services to VeriFone's PayWare Mobile iPhone application.

PayWare, which is aimed at small businesses, consists of a hardware add-on and complementary iPhone application that turn a mobile handset into a credit card reader. With the new PayPal partnership, PayWare will accommodate PayPal payments as well as traditional credit-card transactions, and PayPal will market PayWare to its user base of business owners and eBay sellers. In addition, PayWare will now … Read more

Continued strong performance from its PayPal online commerce system led auction and retail giant eBay to surpass Wall Street's expectations once again in third-quarter earnings. Analysts had predicted $2.18 billion in revenue on earnings of 37 cents per share; eBay posted $2.25 billion on earnings of 40 cents per share. Net income was up 14 percent.

PayPal has been adding more than a million accounts per month, now with over 90 million active users worldwide. It's been eBay's strongest weapon for quite some time now, fueling better-than-expected performance in the company's past few quarterly reports. … Read more

More than $100,000 worth of checks got deposited through PayPal's mobile check-capture service in its first 36 hours, the company announced.

"We knew that this would be popular, but we had no idea how much pent up demand there was...," a PayPal spokeswoman wrote on the company's blog yesterday.

PayPal's iPhone app, which was updated with the new feature on Wednesday, lets people take a picture of a check and have that amount deposited into their PayPal account at no charge. The service requires people to hold onto checks for 15 days to allow … Read more