Cyber attacks force WikiLeaks to move web address

The WikiLeaks website was forced to move its web address to Switzerland on Friday after being temporarily forced off-line by cyber attacks on Friday. The whistleblowing site relaunched at wikileaks.ch after going down for six hours.

By News Wires (text)

REUTERS - WikiLeaks moved its website address to Switzerland on Friday after two U.S. Internet providers ditched it in the space of two days, and Paris tried to ban French servers from hosting its database of leaked information.

The Internet publisher announced it had moved to http://wikileaks.ch, after the wikileaks.org site on which it had published classified U.S. government information vanished from view for about six hours.

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EveryDNS.net, which helps computers to locate the sites of its members, said it had stopped providing services to WikiLeaks at 2200 U.S. Eastern time on Thursday (0300 GMT on Friday).

WikiLeaks had turned to EveryDNS and host servers in Europe after Amazon.com stopped hosting the site on Thursday.

The United States is furious about WikiLeaks' publication of hundreds of confidential diplomatic cables that have given unvarnished and sometimes embarrassing insights into the foreign policy of the United States and its allies.

Amazon denied it was under pressure from lawmakers, saying WikiLeaks had breached its terms by not owning the rights to the content it was publishing. But U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee chairman Joe Lieberman questioned Amazon about its relationship with WikiLeaks on Tuesday and called on other companies that host websites to boycott WikiLeaks.