Dmitriy Guzner, 18, of Verona, New Jersey, is charged with helping in the attack on Scientologist servers in January. He has agreed to plead guilty to a single felony charge of unauthorized impairment of a protected computer and pay US$37,500 in damages.
Guzner identifies himself as a member of the online group called ‘Anonymous’. The group is a loose collection of internet activist who undertake online activities, such as the attack on Scientology (dubbed Project Chanology), the tracking and arrest of suspected paedophile Chris Forcand and the hacking of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email.
The Justice Department has said that Guzner will be put on trial in the coming weeks and could face up to ten years in prison.
According to court papers Guzner "knowingly caused the transmission of information, codes and commands and as a result of such conduct, intentionally and without authorization caused damage by impairing the integrity and availability of data, a program, a system and information on a computer system that was used in interstate and foreign commerce and communications, specifically websites belonging to the Church of Scientology, thereby causing loss to one or more persons aggregating at least US$5,000 in value."
The attacks were carried out by a variety of people and illustrate the extent to when a small group of individuals can attack organisations which they feel they have a grievance with.
In this case skilled members of the group wrote attack code, which was then sent to ordinary members who implemented the attacks. At the same time other members sent faxes of pure black paper to the group to use up toner and spamming phone lines with crank calls.
Teenage hacker charged for DDOS attack on Scientology
By
Iain Thomson
on Oct 20, 2008 6:44AM
A teenager who took part in a distributed denial of service attack against the so-called church of Scientology has been charged.
