Ecuador said on Monday it has suffered 40 million cyber attacks on the webpages of public institutions since stripping Wikileaks founder Julian Assange of political asylum.
Patricio Real, Ecuador’s deputy minister for information and communication technologies, said the attacks, which began on Thursday, had “principally come from the United States, Brazil, Holland, Germany, Romania, France, Austria and the United Kingdom,” as well as from the South American country itself.
Assange was arrested and carried out of Ecuador’s embassy in London on Thursday after President Lenin Moreno removed his diplomatic protection following seven years of self-imposed exile in the building.
Moreno accused Assange of interfering in the “processes of other states” and “spying.”
As well as overturning Assange’s asylum status, Ecuador stripped him of the nationality he was given in 2017 under the government of Moreno’s predecessor Rafael Correa.
Javier Jara, undersecretary of the electronic government department of the telecommunications ministry, said the country had suffered “volumetric attacks” that blocked access to the internet following “threats from those groups linked to Julian Assange.”
Hardest-hit were the foreign ministry, the central bank, the president’s office, the internal revenue service, and several ministries and universities.
However none of those institutions reported either the theft of information or the elimination of data.
Related: WikiLeaks Set 21st Century Model for Cyber-Leak Journalism
Related: Julian Assange – A Decade of Stunning Leaks of U.S. Secrets

More from AFP
- France Punishes Clearview AI For Failing To Pay Fine
- Twitter Celebrity Hacker Pleads Guilty in US
- Pro-Russian Hackers Claim Downing of French Senate Website
- Microsoft Expands AI Access to Public
- Hackers Promise AI, Install Malware Instead
- Australian Finance Company Refuses Hackers’ Ransom Demand
- Tesla Sued Over Workers’ Alleged Access to Car Video Imagery
- Secret US Documents on Ukraine War Plan Spill Onto Internet: Report
Latest News
- Industrial Giant ABB Confirms Ransomware Attack, Data Theft
- Organizations Worldwide Targeted in Rapidly Evolving Buhti Ransomware Operation
- Google Cloud Users Can Now Automate TLS Certificate Lifecycle
- Zyxel Firewalls Hacked by Mirai Botnet
- Watch Now: Threat Detection and Incident Response Virtual Summit
- NCC Group Releases Open Source Tools for Developers, Pentesters
- Memcyco Raises $10 Million in Seed Funding to Prevent Website Impersonation
- New Russia-Linked CosmicEnergy ICS Malware Could Disrupt Electric Grids
