WikiLeaks Cyber War

The man said that, in addition to attacking the Anonymous IRC servers, the Operation Fightback group had also been putting up fake targets to confuse Anonymous members and get them to attack the wrong IP addresses.

"There are still people hanging around on the Operation Payback channel and trying to co-ordinate attacks and the last known target was Mastercard.com, but that seems to be falling apart because of both the DDoS on the IRC channel as well as people getting IP banned when they launch attacks against Mastercard.com," he said.

"Mastercard.com administrators appear to be actively monitoring incoming packets and they're doing IP blocks on wherever an attack is coming from."

Anonymous members are just 'script kiddies'

The Sydney Anonymous member has grown increasingly disillusioned with his colleagues over the weekend, saying today that they were "really just ordinary dumb shit kids" who do not know much about network technology.

He said attacks on PayPal failed for the most part because PayPal had a sophisticated server farm that could not be knocked out by a DDoS attack, and the Anonymous members were hitting the wrong target.

"If they would've gone after PayPal's domain name server [DNS] they would have been able to shut down PayPal entirely but they didn't know enough about network technology to work that out," he said.

The Sydney Anonymous member said the group had also failed in similar attempts to attack Amazon, which last week refused to host WikiLeaks files. Some of Amazon's European websites suffered a half-hour outage over the weekend but it was not clear whether this was caused by cyber attacks.

He said that, rather than being full-blown hackers, the Anonymous members were "script kiddies" who only knew how to download the LOIC program and run it.

"They're very unprofessional, illogical and irrational and very much their actions are based upon emotions," he said.

"They don't organise well, they don't co-ordinate well and it's a lot like CB radio back in the 1970s - people farting into the microphone. These people couldn't organise a piss-up in a pub."