WikiLeaks 'hacked' before release

Whistle-blower website says first batch of US files to be revealed by five media houses on Sunday despite online attack.


WikiLeaks has said that its website has been compromised, just hours before the expected release of a tranche of secret US diplomatic documents.
"We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack," Wikileaks said on its Twitter page.
But WikiLeaks said that five publications "will publish many US embassy cables tonight" even if the website goes down.
Meanwhile, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has said the imminent release of the classified  documents by the whistle-blower website will amount to a "diplomatic history" of global affairs.
"The material that we are about to release covers essentially every major issue in every country," Assange told reporters in Jordan by video link from an undisclosed location on Sunday.
WikiLeaks is reportedly hours away from releasing hundreds of thousands of confidential US diplomatic cables, with several governments fearing damaging revelations.
US officials took the unusual step on Saturday of sending a letter to WikiLeaks to warn against the release of the secret government documents, which it says will put "countless" lives at risk.
The letter, from Harold Hongju Koh, the US state department's top lawyer, argued that publishing the classified files would threaten counterterrorism operations and jeopardise US relations with its allies.
"No single individual has even come to harm as a result of anything that we have ever published," Assange said on Sunday.
The classified documents reportedly cover correspondence between US diplomatic missions abroad and the state department in Washington and could reveal "unflattering" views that American officials held about close EU allies and countries like Russia and Turkey.
US diplomats have been visiting foreign ministries hoping to stave off anger over the cables, which are internal messages that often lack the niceties diplomats voice in public.
WikiLeaks has said the newest release will be seven times the size of the October publication of 400,000 Iraq war documents, the biggest leak to date in US intelligence history.
The site also published 77,000 classified US files on the Afghan conflict in July