US teen pleads guilty over Scientology DDoS attacks
Anonymous botnet hacktivist faces spell behind bars
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A US teenager has admitted involvement in a high profile denial of service attack against Scientology websites last year.
Dmitriy Guzner of Verona, New Jersey, 19, pleaded guilty on Monday to charges of using a botnet of compromised PCs in order to flood Church of Scientology-related websites with spurious traffic back in January 2008. Guzner faces between 12 and 18 months at a sentencing hearing, due to take place on 24 August.
Guzner identified himself among the members of the Anonymous group which has been actively protesting against the Church of Scientology since last year, Assistant U.S. Attorney Wesley Hsu told a Newark Court, AP reports. Papers against Guzner were filed last October in a Los Angeles federal court before the case was moved to New Jersey.
Anonymous launched an ongoing campaign against the Church of Scientology in January 2008 after the controversial organisation attempted to pressurise websites into pulling an infamous video of Tom Cruise, taken at an earlier church awards event.
Tactics used since have moved on from nuisance phone calls to Church of Scientology premises and denial of service attacks to monthly, peaceful protests outside Church facilities. Members of loosely-affiliated group are known for wearing Guy Fawkes-style masks during protests.
Guzner is the first member of Anonymous to be charged over the DDoS attacks. It's unclear how the authorities tracked down Guzner or whether he was implicated in other incidents of cybercrime beyond attempts to blitz Church of Scientology websites. ®
COMMENTS
Anonymous?
Just goes to prove there's no such thing as Anonymous these days. If they want to pick you up to punish you, then they can.
Given they way its going, within the next 10 years the Internet will be more like Big Brother than a source of information. How long after that, will the real world end up being watched as closely as the virtual world is starting to get watched?.
DDos Internet Protest
The where just protesting, they didn't harm any one or try and steal credit card information. It wasn't like the went in to the church of Scientology stole all their money, raped their women and sprayed the place with ak47's.
I mean come on!!
Whatever you think of scientology...
...and let me say that I'm no fan of it myself - a religion is defined by whether or not people genuinely believe it and have faith in it.
As there are multitudes of people who DO believe that L. Ron Hubbard's writings were truthful, both within and without the CoS, Scientology is, unfortunately, a religion. The fact hat the founder of the religion was a charlatan and a fraud is pretty irrelevant now - many people have faith in scientology and there are even splinter groups who practice scientology but are not affiliated in any way with the CoS itself.
The 'Anonymous' thing is cute, but really all it achieves is to antagonise the Scientologists and make them even more determined, i.e. it's counter-productive and, in a way, legitimises the scientologists.
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