MasterCard SecureCode service impacted in attacks over WikiLeaks

09.12.2010
The by WikiLeaks supporters that knocked the credit card company's Web site offline today may have caused more problems than previously thought.

MasterCard itself has so far said publicly only that its corporate Web site experienced availability issues as a result of a sustained distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the site. In a statement this afternoon, the company said that it was making progress addressing the issue and that no customer transactions had been affected.

It now appears that the company's Securecode service for secure online transactions was also affected. It's not clear, however, whether the SecureCode problems were caused by Anonymous, the group that knocked MasterCard's corporate site offline after the attacks began about 4 a.m. ET.

In , the company said that MasterCard and Maestro transactions could not be processed via SecureCode because of a service disruption to the MasterCard Directory Server.

The server has been since failed over to a secondary site, but customers could still experience intermittent connectivity issues, MasterCard said. It did not offer a timetable for when it hopes to restore full service.

A MasterCard spokeswoman confirmed the disruptions to the SecureCode service, but insisted that online transactions had not been affected. Instead, there were "isolated reports" of SecureCode service slowdowns reported, she said, adding that SecureCode service has been restored to normal.