The group, which was formed in response to efforts to shut down file-sharing and movie downloads, said that it had started distributed denial of service attacks against MasterCard.com — essentially flooding the site with traffic to slow it down or knock it offline. - NYTimes [Wednesday, December 8, 2010]

Just before 8 a.m. Eastern time, MasterCard released a statement that said:

MasterCard is experiencing heavy traffic on its external corporate website – MasterCard.com. We are working to restore normal speed of service. There is no impact whatsoever on our cardholders ability to use their cards for secure transactions.