Wikileaks .ORG Domain Cancelled; Re-Registered With .CH Domain

Wikileaks has been forced to change its domain name after its registrar, EveryDNS, withdrew its services for the wikileaks.org domain. The whistleblower website has now re-registered a domain name in Switzerland and its new domain is wikileaks.ch.The change came about “after a barrage of attacks by hackers that threatened to destabilise its entire system,” according to the registrar and Wikileaks.Currently when trying to access the wikileaks.org website a server not found message or address is not valid message is received. However the website is still available when typing in a number of the IP addresses, including 46.59.1.2 and 213.251.145.96, addresses that have been promoted on Twitter.EveryDNS provides registrar services for around 490,000 domain names and its actions follow the withdrawal of website hosting services by Amazon, who was providing hosting services, possibly only temporarily while the current high demand for the website continues. Currently the Wikileaks website is hosted on the servers of the Swedish webhost Bahnhof.There are reports that Amazon stopped hosting the Wikileaks website “on Wednesday after being contacted by the staff of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee,” according to Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent of Connecticut, in a report in The New York Times.”Staff members had asked Amazon to explain its business relationship with WikiLeaks, which Senator Lieberman, the committee’s chairman, had criticized for publishing sensitive government documents,” the report in The Times continued.EveryDNS has noted on their website they terminated the Wikileaks domain around 04:00 Central European time (22:00 EST, December 2, 2010) on Friday.”The termination of services was effected pursuant to, and in accordance with, the EveryDNS.net Acceptable Use Policy,” says a statement on the EveryDNS.net website.”The services were terminated for violation of the provision which states that a ‘member shall not interfere with another member’s use and enjoyment of the service or another entity’s use and enjoyment of similar services.’ The interference at issues arises from the fact that wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites.”The EveryDNS statement said wikileaks.org “has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.” Such attacks usually involve bombarding a Web site with attacks, preventing legitimate users from access and designed to make a targeted Web site unavailable.”These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other Web sites.”