PARIS (AFP) – The noose tightened around WikiLeaks on Friday as cyber attacks temporarily forced the whistleblowing website off the Internet and its elusive founder Julian Assange faced a fresh arrest warrant.

The website had to find a new Swiss domain name after its original wikileaks.org address was shut down because it was suffering the massive attacks, which Assange's lawyer said were likely to blame on a “state actor.”
With most major countries in the world left red-faced by details revealed in the slew of a quarter million leaked confidential diplomatic cables, the attacks could originate almost anywhere and seem unlikely to end any time soon.
Lawyer Mark Stephens said the “sophisticated” efforts to take down the site may be part of a general effort to silence Assange, after Sweden said it would issue a fresh arrest warrant for him on sexual assault charges.
“Somebody, probably a state actor, has taken control of literally hundreds of thousands of vulnerable computers across the world and got them all to dial in to the WikiLeaks website simultaneously,” Stephens told AFP.
“It's very sophisticated and we know that Julian has suffered a number of such attacks, we know there have also been some odd other things going on in Sweden,” added Stephens, who is based in London.
Assange is reportedly in hiding in Britain. Stephens would not reveal his client's location but he said British police and Swedish authorities know where the 39-year-old Australian is and how to contact him.
The whistleblower site came back online with its new Swiss address -- wikileaks.ch -- on Friday, six hours after its previous domain name was shut down by a US system provider following a series of attacks.
“WikiLeaks moves to Switzerland,” the group declared on Twitter, although an Internet trace of the new domain name suggested that the site itself is still hosted in Sweden and in France, after it was kicked off Amazon's U.S. servers.
A separate search via the whois.net tool indicated that the wikileaks.ch site name is owned by the Swiss Pirates Party, which campaigns for data privacy and Internet freedoms. It was not immediately available to comment.
U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has described the leaks as “an attack on the world” and on Thursday expressed her regret to Argentine President Cristina Kirchner and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari over their content.
WikiLeaks has reported a string of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks since dumping the U.S. documents.
Classic DDoS attacks occur when legions of “zombie” computers, normally machines infected with viruses, are commanded to simultaneously visit a website, overwhelming servers or knocking them offline completely.
The latest technological setback for the whistleblower site came after Amazon booted it from its computer servers on Wednesday following pressure from U.S. politicians, prompting the site to move to a French server.
“Free speech the land of the free -- fine our dollars are now spent to employ people in Europe,” WikiLeaks said. “If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the First Amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.”
With the elusive whistleblower laid low, a group of U.S. senators introduced legislation that would make it illegal to publish the names of informants serving the US military and intelligence community.
The legislation, which would amend the U.S. Espionage Act aimed at punishing the disclosure of secret information, could help to stop such leaks from happening again.
Photo: This illustration taken on November 30, 2010 in Schwerin, northeastern Germany, shows a woman looking at the WikiLeaks website featuring a picture of the organization’s founder Julian Assange. (AFP/DPA/File/Jens Buttner)