MasterCard

A 22-year-old U.K. man was convicted for his involvement in a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks launched by the hacktivist group Anonymous against PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and other companies in 2010.

Christopher Weatherhead, of Northampton, U.K., was convicted Thursday at London's Southwark Crown Court on one count of conspiracy to impair the operation of computers, contrary to the U.K. Criminal Law Act of 1977, the U.K.'s Crown Prosecution Service said in a blog post.

After almost two years of fighting an unlawful banking blockade by US financial giants VISA and MasterCard, WikiLeaks has announced it is back open for donations using the French credit card system, Carte Bleue. 

The Wau Holland Transparency Reports for WikiLeaks' finances, released today, illustrate that the blockade resulted in WikiLeaks' income falling to just 21% of its operating costs. WikiLeaks has been forced to run on its cash reserves which have diminished from EUR 800,000 at the end of December 2010, to less than EUR 100,000 at the end of June 2012.

As expected, MasterCard has joined Visa in its support for chip-enabled technology, considered one of the most effective ways to deter counterfeit debit and credit card fraud.

Citing the need to keep pace with advances in technology and new channels from which consumers wish to make payments, particularly mobile and online, MasterCard has laid out a "roadmap," which, it said, will provide added security and control in payment choices.

Whistle-blowing outfit WikiLeaks and DataCell, which handles credit card payment processing on its behalf, have announced they intend to sue Visa and Mastercard after the credit card merchants blocked donations to WikiLeaks last year.

Both Mastercard and Visa stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks after a campaign to hound the organisation out of existence began in the US, following the disclosure of mountains of information the war-hungry imperialist would have preferred to keep quiet.

Hackers are trying to take credit for bringing down MasterCard's website yesterday, a plausible claim given the recent hackathon that's been sweeping through cyberspace. However, the world's second largest consumer payment network blamed the temporary downtime on its telecommunications service provider, while insisting that no card user accounts are in jeopardy.

MasterCard's website is currently inaccessible following what appears to be a WikiLeaks-inspired internet attack against it.

In what appears to be the latest salvo by hactivists, the mastercard.com website is thought to be suffering from a denial-of-service attack - where an internet site is bombarded with a large amount of traffic making it impossible for genuine visitors to access it.