The WikiLeaks site, moved onto Amazon's cloud days earlier as the diplomatic cables drew floods of attack traffic, vanished from it on Wednesday 1 December 2010. Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, whose staff had telephoned Amazon to ask about them, spoke first: "This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the WikiLeaks website." Amazon answered the next day that reports of a government inquiry behind the decision were "inaccurate". It "does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed": customers had to own or control the rights to their content, and it was not credible, Amazon said, that 250,000 classified documents had been redacted carefully enough to keep innocent people out of jeopardy. WikiLeaks had already answered on Twitter that if Amazon were "so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books".
At 10 p.m. Eastern time on 2 December, after a day's notice, EveryDNS stopped resolving wikileaks.org, saying attacks on the domain threatened the 500,000 or so other sites it served. By Friday 3 December the site was at wikileaks.ch, and that day PayPal said it had "permanently restricted" the account under a policy barring use to "encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity". On 6 December PostFinance, the Swiss postal bank, closed Julian Assange's account, saying he had given false information about where he lived, and MasterCard moved to ensure that WikiLeaks "can no longer accept MasterCard-branded products". Visa Europe suspended payments on 7 December, "pending further investigation". On 8 December a PayPal vice-president, Osama Bedier, cited a State Department letter of 27 November, then clarified that it had been sent to WikiLeaks, not to PayPal.
The answer came from Operation Payback, begun in September against anti-piracy firms, whose volunteers ran the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a free stress-testing program with a Hive Mind mode that let a chat channel aim their machines. On 8 December the operation announced that MasterCard.com was "DOWN AND IT'S CONFIRMED!", and at four that afternoon, Eastern time, it turned on Visa.com, which many users could not reach. MasterCard said its site "remains accessible" and that there was "no impact whatsoever" on cardholders' use of their cards; but a payment firm told the BBC its customers had suffered "a complete loss of service" from MasterCard's SecureCode check on online purchases, and MasterCard later allowed "limited interruption in some web-based services". An attack on Amazon, announced on 9 December, was abandoned; attacking a retailer while people bought presents, the organisers said, would be "in bad taste".
The tool gave its users away. LOIC's floods were easy to pick out of a server's logs and could be traced to the addresses that sent them. On 9 December the Dutch police's high-tech crime team arrested a sixteen-year-old in The Hague who admitted taking part in the attacks on MasterCard and PayPal, and took his computers for examination. In Britain, Christopher Weatherhead, a Northampton University student who prosecutors said helped run the operation's chat network, was convicted in December 2012 and jailed for eighteen months in January 2013. PayPal put its cost at £3.5 million, covering more than a hundred staff drafted from eBay, its parent, and extra hardware and services — the price of staying up, not a measure of lost sales. The American arrests over PayPal are July 2011's story.
The Commenters' Passwords
On the afternoon of Sunday 12 December 2010 a group calling itself Gnosis put a file of almost 500 megabytes on The Pirate Bay: the source code of the publishing system behind Gawker, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku and Gawker Media's other sites, staff chat logs, executives' credentials and the commenter database — some 1.3 million accounts. The passwords had been hashed with the old DES-based Unix crypt, which uses only the first eight characters, and about 188,000 arrived already decoded. The Wall Street Journal counted more than 3,000 people using 123456, nearly 2,000 using password and, in fourth place, lifehack. Gnosis said it had acted over the company's "outright arrogance", pointing to Gawker's running feud with 4chan; Gawker said it was "deeply embarrassed" and should not be "relying on the goodwill of the hackers who identified the weakness in our systems". On 13 December acai-berry spam began pouring from Twitter accounts whose owners had reused their Gawker passwords. Twitter traced it to the breach and reset the passwords it suspected; LinkedIn, Yahoo and World of Warcraft took precautions of their own.
The Mailing House
In the second week of December 2010 Walgreens told customers on its offers list of "unauthorized access to an email list of customers who receive special offers and newsletters", and warned that some had since been sent spam asking them to enter personal data elsewhere. In the same days McDonald's said a long-time partner, Arc Worldwide, had told it that "limited customer information" from its websites and promotions — names, email and postal addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates — had been taken from the database of an email firm Arc had hired; nothing financial was held there. deviantART, the art-sharing site, said its mailing list of some 13 million addresses had gone the same way. That week an FBI special agent in Atlanta, Stephen Emmett, named the firm: "The breach is with Silverpop, an email service provider that has over 105 customers. It appears to be emanating from an overseas location." Silverpop said it had seen suspicious activity in "a small percentage" of its customer accounts. Arc also handled promotions for Walgreens, which named no supplier. The same trade's larger failure is April 2011's story.
A Couple of Days
On the night of Friday 3 December 2010 the home page of the Central Bureau of Investigation was replaced by a message from a group calling itself the Pakistan Cyber Army, with the slogan "Pakistan Zindabad". It said the attack was "in response to the Pakistani websites hacked by 'Indian Cyber Army'", warned Indian hackers off and boasted of root access to the National Informatics Centre, which hosted most government sites; the centre stayed silent. The CBI's spokesman, R. K. Gaur, said the site "was accessed without authorization and defaced Friday night", a case was registered in the bureau's cyber crime cell, and a spokeswoman said restoring it would take "a couple of days". Ten days later it was still not working, and officials would not comment; Moneylife reported that the NIC and CERT-In were disputing whose job the repair was.
The message had the order right. At the end of November a group calling itself the Indian Cyber Army had defaced some three dozen Pakistani government sites, the navy's and three ministries' among them, invoking the Mumbai attacks of 2008; Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency said it had recovered 36. The Indian group then claimed access to hundreds of other Pakistani sites, and Pakistani groups claimed hundreds of Indian ones; beyond the agency's figure for its own sites, every tally came from the people claiming it. The same banner's unchecked claim against BSNL is July 2011's; the pattern returned, vastly larger, during Operation Sindoor in May 2025. A defaced government site is now an incident to be reported to CERT-In within six hours.
Google counts the words in 5.2 million books
On 16 December 2010 Google opened the Books Ngram Viewer, which charted phrases of up to five words year by year across 5.2 million digitised books, some 500 billion words, and released the counts. Science published its companion paper online that day. Its thirteen named authors, led by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden of Harvard and including Google engineers, called the method "culturomics" and, from a corpus of about 4 per cent of all books ever printed, reported an English lexicon grown by more than 70 per cent in fifty years, fame coming sooner and fading faster, and Marc Chagall all but erased from Nazi-era German print. Louis Menand objected that no humanist was among the authors, and historians soon found the scans reading the old long s as f; in 2015 Vermont mathematicians questioned most claims drawn from a corpus holding one copy of each book and a rising share of scientific texts. The Viewer still runs. On 15 December Facebook had announced face-recognition tag suggestions for American users; their switch-on abroad is June 2011's story.
Microsoft's free anti-virus reaches version 2.0
On 16 December 2010 Microsoft quietly released version 2.0 of Security Essentials, its anti-virus, free to home users and to businesses with up to ten PCs. It added script blocking in Internet Explorer, better heuristics, a prompt to switch on Windows Firewall and, on Vista and Windows 7 but not XP, a network inspection system. AV-Comparatives' December summary of its 2010 tests, written before the release, gave version 1 a silver for few false alarms and bronzes for proactive detection and light system load, "very creditable scores", it said, for one of only two free programs tested. Its product of the year, F-Secure, was picked from several it could not fairly separate, for the most progress on 2009. On 29 December the mobile-security firm Lookout described Geinimi, a trojan grafted onto repackaged games in Chinese third-party Android markets that sent phones' identifiers and location to remote servers and could take their commands, though no command had yet been seen; Lookout found no infected copies in Google's own Market. Security Essentials' engine became Windows 8's built-in Defender in 2012.
⏳ Time capsule — December 2010
- On 2 December, at FIFA's headquarters in Zurich, the executive committee awarded the 2018 World Cup to Russia in the second round of voting and the 2022 tournament to Qatar in the fourth, by 14 votes of 22.
- On 10 December the Nobel Peace Prize was presented in Oslo City Hall to Liu Xiaobo, then in prison in China; the committee's chairman, Thorbjørn Jagland, placed the prize on an empty chair, and Liv Ullmann read Liu's essay "I Have No Enemies".
- On 15 December Time named Mark Zuckerberg, the twenty-six-year-old founder and chief executive of Facebook, its Person of the Year for 2010.
- On 25 December India's GSLV-F06, carrying the communications satellite GSAT-5P, lost control about 45 seconds after lifting off from Sriharikota and was destroyed by the range safety officer 63 seconds into the flight; the debris fell into the Bay of Bengal.
Rules, not rulings
None of December's cut-offs was ordered by a court. Amazon cited its terms of service, PayPal its acceptable use policy, PostFinance its residence rule, MasterCard and Visa their own rules; the one government document cited, by PayPal, was a letter the State Department had sent to WikiLeaks. In Iceland, on 24 April 2013, the Supreme Court upheld a ruling against Valitor, the local Visa processor, and ordered it to accept payments for WikiLeaks within fifteen days or pay 800,000 krónur a day, and that July WikiLeaks said Valitor had told it MasterCard payments were flowing again. The European Commission had taken the preliminary view in November 2012 that the blocking was unlikely to have broken EU competition rules. WikiLeaks put its loss at 95 per cent of its revenue; the figure was its own.
The volunteer flood did not outlive its logs. Thirteen of the Americans charged over PayPal pleaded guilty in December 2013, and a security firm's boast that it had found the leaders ended with its own mail on a torrent in February 2011. The floods that followed needed no crowd: servers in data centres against American banks in September 2012, hijacked cameras against Dyn, a DNS provider as EveryDNS had been, in October 2016. What outlasted the month was its other lesson — that the companies a publisher rents from can end its reach on their own reading of their own terms. Amazon did so again, on different grounds, when it stopped hosting Parler in January 2021.