Cyberattacks this week by supporters of Wikileaks on the home sites of Visa and MasterCard may have been designed to grab headlines rather than actually disrupt the companies’ financial operations. The wave of electronic assaults, referred to as “Operation Payback” by the activists mounting the attacks, were aimed at the home sites of the credit card companies. Those sites have high profiles but relatively low traffic levels — traffic levels that make them more vulnerable to a distributed denial of service attack.
