CYBERATTACKS ON ECUADOR

Public institutions hit following WikiLeaks founder’s arrest on Thursday

ECUADOR said yesterday it has suffered 40 million cyberattacks on the webpages of public institutions since stripping WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of political asylum.

Deputy Information and Communication Technologies Minister Patricio Real said the attacks, which began on Thursday, had “principally come from the United States, Brazil, Holland, Germany, Romania, France, Austria

and the United Kingdom” as well as from the South American country itself.

Assange was arrested and carried out of Ecuador’s embassy in London on Thursday after President Lenin Moreno removed his diplomatic protection following seven years of self-imposed exile.

Moreno accused Assange of interfering in the “processes of other states” and “spying”.

As well as overturning Assange’s asylum status, Ecuador stripped him of the nationality he was given in 2017 under the government of Moreno’s predecessor, Rafael Correa.

Javier Jara, under-secretary of the Electronic Government Department of the Telecommunications Ministry, said the country suffered “volumetric attacks” that blocked access to the Internet following “threats from those groups linked to Assange”.

Hardest-hit were the Foreign Ministry, the central bank, the president’s office, the internal revenue service, and several ministries and universities.

However, none of those institutions reported either the theft of information or the elimination of data.

In Washington, federal prosecutors alleged in a newly unsealed court filing on Monday that Assange and former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning had reason to believe that leaking US military reports “would cause injury” to the country.

In the affidavit submitted to federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, prosecutors said military reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq included information about the “identity and significance of local supporters of US and allied forces in Afghanistan”.

When US forces raided the compound in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was hiding out, for example, they found a letter that showed the al-Qaeda leader was interested in copies of Pentagon documents published on WikiLeaks, the prosecutors said.

The prosecution’s affidavit is dated Dec 21, 2017, but was made public on Monday.

It follows the unsealing last week of a US indictment charging Assange with conspiring with Manning to gain access to a government computer as part of one of the largest compromises of classified information in US history.