Turkish coup document leak delayed do to ‘sustained cyberattack’ – The Hill

WikiLeaks claims a cyberattack has kept it from leaking hundreds of thousands of documents related to the attempted Turkish coup.

The site, both famous and controversial for leaking State Department cables, Sony emails and other high profile documents, had announced a Tuesday release of 300,000 emails and 500,000 documents from embattled President Recep Erdoğan’s AKP political party.

It did not ultimately release the files, claiming to have fallen victim to a “sustained attack” on its infrastructure with timing that “suggests a Turkish state power faction or its allies.”

WikiLeaks, which has been communicating about the attack via Twitter. It has not specifically mentioned what kind of attack it has sustained, but it is widely suspected to be a distributed denial of service attack , where a network of computers deliberately overflows a target server with too much traffic to sustain operations.

If that suspicion is wrong, WikiLeaks has not corrected the mistake.

WikiLeaks’s site is still active, but all an attacker would have to do to prevent WikiLeaks from publishing is take up enough bandwidth that its servers could not handle the increased traffic related to the new documents.

WikiLeaks has claimed the documents it will release “both helps & harms AKP.”