The recent attacks on MasterCard by Wikileaks supporters, knocking the credit card company site off the internet might prove even more disastrous than perceived before.

So far, MasterCard has only acknowledged the fact that the corporate website faced availability issues owing to a continued Distributed Denial of Service attack undertaken against the site. The statement issued these afternoon assured customers that the issue was being addressed and security and protection to consumer transaction was being ensured.

There have also been reports that the company’s Secure code Service for secure online transaction was also affected. But there is still confusion over whether this was caused by Anonymous, the same group which sent the corporate site offline after the attacks began at 4 am ET.

Through manifold bulletins to deal processing company, announcement were sent that there were difficulty in processing dealings through MasterCard and genius services due to a service disturbance to the MasterCard Directory server.

Although the server has been failed to a secondary site, customers might still experience irregular connectivity problems. MasterCard added that there could not be a definite time allotted for the problem to be completely solved.

The disruptions to the MasterCard service were confirmed by a company spokeswoman, but she insisted that online transactions remained unaffected. She added, that there have been certain isolated cases of ServiceCode slowdown reported and that these services had been restored to normal.

MasterCard rival Visa, also suffered a comparable DDoS harass and was knocked offline this daylight. According to Sean Paul Corel, a researcher with Panda Labs, there was two split attacks which hit the Visa shared website. Corell supplementary that he had been maintain a regular fill in on these attacks on his blog.

The first attacks began late last midnight and resulted in intermittent service disruption for several hours. However, Corell added that no group had claimed responsibility for these attacks so far.

At about 4pm ET, the company was hit with another DDoS attack. This was confirmed as the work of the group Anonymous, a group of affiliated hackers attacking organizations against the censoring of WikiLeaks.

In a statement issued on its corporate website, Visa.com, the company specified that it was experiencing more traffic than was usual and hoped to restore all site operations within the span of a few hours. Visa’s processing network, key to cardholder transactions remains stable and functioning. Cardholders can continue to use their cards without any fear for the account data.

Anonymous, also involved in attacks on the entertainment industry sites over enforcement issues, launched Operation Avenge Assange this week. It is targeted at all organizations looking to censure WikiLeaks information.

The group has been blamed for the attacks on Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Swiss payment transaction firm PostFinance, EveryDNS and many more. The targets had announced suspension of services to WikiLeaks after it began leaking confidential US State Department cables.

In addition to these attacks, Anonymous have also been involved in attacks on the sites of Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as well as the websites of Swedish prosecutors pursuing rape charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.