paypal denial of service attack

Mashable | The list of organizations banning WikiLeaks is growing; now PayPal has made it clear that the whistleblower website is no longer welcome through its virtual doors.

The move closes the primary online channel for donations to the controversial organization, which has been facing increased pressure from world governments.

“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,” the company said in a statement on its blog. “We’ve notified the account holder of this action.”

WikiLeaks has had recent difficulty keeping the donations channels open. Donations through Moneybookers was blocked in October after the U.S. and Australia put the organization on its watch lists, and earlier this year PayPal suspended the WikiLeaks account temporarily.

WikiLeaks has been attracting a great deal of attention this week after it released 250,000+ sensitive U.S. diplomatic wires. Since then, the company has been under attack from hackers and the U.S. government alike. Amazon recently kicked WikiLeaks off of its servers, as did its DNS service provider.