14 DAY TRIAL // Dmitriy Guzner, 18, from Verona, New Jersey, has been charged for launching DDoS attacks that crippled websites belonging to the Church of Scientology in January 2008. His actions were part of a much larger campaign against Scientology launched in January by a group calling themselves Anonymous. Guzner has agreed to plead guilty for a count of transmitting information, code and commands with the intention to harm a computer system and he faces a maximum of ten years in a federal prison plus the payment of $37,500 as restitution for the damage he caused.
In January 2008, a group calling themselves Anonymous launched a serious campaign against the Church of Scientology. Their original warning posted on YouTube stated the following, “Leaders of Scientology, we are Anonymous. [...] Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed... [...] We shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology”. A wave of harassing phone calls, obscene faxes and e-mails, death, physical and bomb threats, plus DDoS attacks followed. This even escalated into vandalism and gun shots being fired at properties belonging to the Church.
The Church of Scientology has issued a video in which they report the damage caused by Anonymous' hate campaign. According to them, 8,139 threatening phone calls were made, 3.6 million e-mails were sent, their websites registered 141 million hits and, more seriously, the group is responsible for ten acts of vandalism, 22 bomb threats and eight death threats against the Church leaders.
The DDoS attacks launched by Dmitriy Guzner have successfully brought down systems and public websites used by the Church of Scientology for foreign commerce and communication purposes. “Defendant DMITRY GUZNER engaged in the above-described distributed denial of service ('DDOS') attack against the Church of Scientology websites, contributing to the unavailability of the websites, because he believed the attack furthered the goals of the anti-Scientology group 'Anonymous,' of which he considered himself a member,” is noted in the charges brought against him by United States Attorney, Thomas P. O’Brien.
The Anonymous groups are actually the members of a popular and eccentric amusement board called /b/ located on the 4chan website. “Their sense of humor runs the gamut from sick to cruel to merely strange. [...] Anonymous is not a group of hackers. Anonymous is more like [online] gremlins,” says a user about the people frequenting the board. The board users call themselves Anonymous, or Anon, because they generally post under the default anonymous account in order to hide their identity.
A more recent event originating on this board is the hacking of the Yahoo! E-mail account belonging to Alaska Governor and republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. A 20-year-old student, by the name of David C. Kernell, has been indicted for this illegal act. On September 17, David Kernell used social engineering in order to obtain unauthorized access to the e-mail account of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Then, he posted screen shots with the content of the account on the /b/ board. In a self-confession posted later on the same board, he claimed that his reasons derived from media reports claiming that Sarah Palin might be using her personal e-mail to conduct official business, thus circumventing the government communications transparency laws.
Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant at Sophos, pointed out, regarding the Dmitriy Guzner case, that “even if a person believes a controversial group is harmful to society, it is utterly reprehensible to take illegal action (such as an internet attack) against them”.
Watch the video regarding the attacks released by the Church of Scientology: