Dmitriy Guzner, 19, of Verona, New Jersey, who was charged back in October 2008 for launching denial of service attacks against online services used by the Church of Scientology, has pleaded guilty, the United States Attorney's Office for the Central District of California (USAO) announces.

Guzner has agreed to plead guilty for the unauthorized impairment of a protected computer belonging to the Church of Scientology, during January 2008. His attack was part of a larger campaign launched against the Church by a group called Anonymous.

Anonymous are said to be members of 4chan's /b/ board, who have gotten their name because they are posting messages under the cover of anonymity. Some reports have presented them as hackers, but other people describe them as nothing more than Internet trolls with a questionable sense of humor.

According to the affected party, the group's hate towards Scientology led to 8,139 threatening phone calls being made, 3.6 million e-mails being sent, 141 million hits on its website, ten acts of vandalism, 22 bomb threats and eight death threats against the Church leaders.

"Guzner is scheduled to be sentenced by United States District Judge Joseph A. Greenaway Jr. on August 24. As a result of today’s guilty plea, Guzner faces a statutory maximum penalty of 10 years in federal prison," is noted in an USAO press release. However, Wired reports that he might receive between 12 to 18 months, under sentencing guidelines.

Dmitriy Guzner was the first Anonymous member to ever be prosecuted. David C. Kernell, another regular of the /b/ board was later indicted for the hacking into the personal e-mail of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, during the campaign for the presidential elections.

Distributed denial of service attacks are relatively common on the Internet. Most of the times, they are performed with the help of botnets (armies of compromised computers) and the motives behind them can range from extortion to hurting the competition or protest. They involve flooding a target with more traffic than it has resources to handle.

For example, the recent The Pirate Bay landmark trial was followed by DDoS attacks against websites operated by the music and film industry as a form of protest. All recent armed conflicts have been accompanied by massive denial of service attacks against strategically important websites belonging to administrations, media outlets or military organizations.