It seems that yesterday, the Wikileaks domain name was pulled by their hosting company due to denial of service attacks. (And probably pressure from US authorities, although I suspect the hosts will not want to admit that)

As I predicted, it’s back online with a new domain name: wikileaks.ch.

OK, so it wasn’t Wikileaks I was talking about but rather FITwatch but the same principle holds. Your domain name can be a weak spot and if you’re doing something unpopular and you’d better make sure you have multiple domains people know about.

Interestingly, the new Wikileaks site is a Swiss domain name registered by the Swiss Pirate Party that points to a server hosted in Sweden that then redirects via IP address, not domain name, to a server in France. For contact details they’re using a PO Box in Australia. Looks like they’re trying to ensure they do not have all their eggs in one basket! (All the redirection makes me think that Wikileaks didn’t even register the domain name themselves, but that the Swiss Pirate Party did it for them as a favour. As they don’t control the target servers, they had to do it with an IP redirect rather than just pointing the new domain name directly at them)