After I posted the earlier article about the pro-Wikileaks non-organization “Anonymous” and their attack on the Bank of America website, and called them (with my usual tact) “vigilante morons,” the non-organization’s hive mind apparently decided to send a message to Little Green Footballs.

I happened to be keeping an eye on referrals, and noticed several hits come in to that article from the non-organization’s IRC and chat sites, then I was followed on Twitter by someone posting updates on the BofA attack — then within minutes, the LGF web server started being flooded with requests for nonexistent files. Our hosting company acted quickly to redirect the bogus traffic, so we were only down for a short time.

On Saturday the New York Times published an editorial decrying the decisions by several financial sites to stop processing donations to Wikileaks, with this exit question:

What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was “too risky”?

Right now, I’m more concerned with what happens when this virtual unorganized pro-Wikileaks lynch mob decides to intimidate bloggers who criticize them.

We aren’t Bank of America or Visa, and we don’t have a distributed network of redundant fall-back servers. When they direct their DDoS program at LGF or just about any bloggers’ site, it can very definitely have a big impact.

The message from “Anonymous” came through loud and clear: “we wouldn’t want to see anything happen to this nice little website you got here.”