Aftermath of WikiLeaks Takedown: Operation Payback

After WikiLeaks released thousands of diplomatic cables, companies began distancing themselves from the controversial site. Banks and payment processors such as eBay's (Nasdaq: EBAY) PayPal among others began cutting ties to the organization, denying users the ability to donate to the site, and the site's Web hosting provider, Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN), decided WikiLeaks had violated its terms of service, and it stopped hosting the site.

In response, hacker group Anonymous, notorious for its war against scientology, has led a coordinated effort to shut down these organizations' websites using denial of service attacks. A denial of service attack is coordinated effort to crash a site by having millions of computers try to access it at the same time.

The attacks started on Monday, when Anonymous first went after Switzerland Post Finance, which said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had falsely claimed residence in Switzerland to obtain the account. The attacks continued yesterday with the targeting of the homepages of Visa (NYSE: V) and MasterCard (NYSE: MA), which were down briefly. The payment processors had stopped allowing payments to be made to WikiLeaks. The takedown of Visa.com is impressive as the site is distributed by Akamai Technologies (Nasdaq: AKAM), which has a massive network of computers to handle excess traffic.

Now, in retribution for taking down WikiLeaks, Anonymous is expected to attack Amazon.com around 11 a.m. ET. As of this writing, the site is still performing well. Adding fuel to Anonymous' outrage is that Amazon.co.uk now has for sale on Kindle the very cables that caused the uproar in the first place.

While Visa.com and Mastercard.com are not vital to their respective company's business operations, Amazon.com is absolutely vital to Amazon. If Anonymous is able to take down Amazon, it will only have a small effect on the business but would call into question Amazon's cloud capabilities, which competitors could play on going forward. Also, competitors such as Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) could score a big publicity win among the tech community if they were to host WikiLeaks. Or at the very least, the company could look like the superior hosting option if hackers persist in attacking Amazon in the coming weeks.

Also, with the major impeding force stopping cloud computing from taking the next step, today's actions could put additional focus on the risks that companies face by hosting their software through large cloud providers like Amazon. If selective hosting practices become common and organizations booted off servers are able to retaliate successfully, that could cause unacceptable downtime for critical systems hosted by cloud providers.

While potentially not very damaging in the long run, Anonymous' actions call attention to the ridiculousness of companies taking punitive action against a media organization for publishing controversial material. On a personal note, I'm glad someone is standing up for freedom of the press. As an investor, events like this only hurt the case for moving to the cloud.

For more on WikiLeaks, check out " 10 Things I Wish WikiLeaks Would Release ."