Hacker faces 10 years for taking down Scientology

An 18-year-old New Jersey man will plead guilty to the January online attacks that took down the Church of Scientology’s Web site, federal prosecutors said Friday. Dmitriy Guzner of Verona, New Jersey, was part of an underground hacking group called Anonymous that has made the church a target of several attacks. He was charged Friday but has agreed to plead guilty sometime in the next few weeks, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. He faces 10 years in prison on computer hacking charges.

The attacks began Jan. 19 and managed to knock the Scientology.org Web site offline by hitting it with several bursts of unwanted Internet traffic. The attack, known as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, flooded the site with as much as 220M bps of traffic, according to computer security firm Arbor Networks. That’s considered to be a decent-sized DDOS attack and was enough to disable the Web site temporarily. Anonymous quickly followed its attacks with a series of YouTube videos, claiming its actions were a response to what it said were efforts by the Church to suppress a video of movie star Tom Cruise professing his admiration for the religion.

Source: PC World