Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
DDOS -- Distributed Denial of Service -- is what's been hammering WikiLeaks the last couple of days.
That's when kajillions of requests for a server's webpage bombard a server, so much so that it can't distinguish between legitimate requests and other traffic. It's called a DDOS attack.
It's used as a blackmail tool ("I pwn 100,000 infected computers, and if I say "go," you'll be hit by 100,000 clients every single second of every day to your site. You'll stop making money. Pay me $100k, and I'll go away"). It's an approach that has generated the black market of viruses. Because if you've infected 1,000,000+ computers with a virus you can command ("hit acme.com every second from your always-on computer connection") then you can bring almost any server down.
Now, WikiLeaks, over the last few days, has been hit by a massive DDOS. Hunh? This is not blackmail as we've come to know it, nor is it something that "hackers" would do.
It means, I'm afraid, that our own governments have been putting viruses on our computers.