Operation Payback: Cyber Battle Erupts Over Wikileaks

It's looking like all out (cyber) war on behalf of Julian Assange.

Hackers forced a shutdown of the Swedish govement's website for several hours on Thursday, as cyber attacks in support of the incarcerated WikiLeaks founder intensified.

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported the govement's official website, www.regeringen.se, went offline for several hours oveight showing a message that the server could not be reached. It was up and running later in the day.

WikiLeaks' hacker backers also created a website with Swedish Justice Minister Beatrice Ask's name, which then rerouted users to the WikiLeaks website instead, according to the newspaper.

A govement spokeswoman told AFP that she would not confirm or deny that a cyber attack had taken place.

Sweden has issued an arrest warrant for the controversial leader of the whistleblower website over alleged sex crimes. The 39-year-old Australian is currently in jail in London, awaiting an extradition hearing.

The computer hackers who support WikiLeaks said Thursday moing that Amazon.com was their next target and they'd attack within hours, CNN reported. The web-hosting arm of Amazon kicked WikiLeaks off its servers last week.

An apparent cyber attack against MasterCard and Visa also ensued after the credit companies stopped accepting payments to WikiLeaks. The corporate websites of the credit giants were inaccessible during brief periods on Wednesday.

On Thursday moing, the Visa site was up and running but the Mastercard site was down.

WikiLeak's payment processor announced Thursday that it would sue the credit card companies for refusing to process donations.

\"It is simply ridiculous to think WikiLeaks has done anything criminal,\" Andreas Fink, CEO of Iceland's DataCell said.

One of Assange's self-proclaimed hacker backers from a group called Anonymous told BBC Radio that \"thousands\" of people had joined what he said was a \"war of data.\" He gave the pseudonym \"Cold Blood.\"

Entries on the Twitter page of the Anonymous campaign \"Operation Payback\" announced Wednesday that the Visa site had been taken down. But later, Operation Payback's Twitter page was replaced with a message from the social network company saying the account had been suspended.

Assange has come under fire in recent months for posting hundreds of thousands of U.S. documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most recently he revealed 250,000 secret State Department cables.

Even Sarah Palin isn't immune from the raging cyber war. The former vice presidential candidate told ABC News that her personal credit card information was hacked into by Operation Payback.

\"No wonder others are keeping silent about Assange's antics,\" Palin decried. \"This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts.\"