A Nebraska resident has agreed to plead guilty to charges related to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against Church of Scientology websites. The plea agreement carries a recommended sentence of twelve months in prison.
Brian Thomas Mettenbrink, 20, of Grand Island, Nebraska, has admitted that in January 2008 he participated in a DDoS attack coordinated by a group known as Anonymous. According to court documents, he downloaded and used a special computer program which had the purpose of overloading Church of Scientology (CoS) websites with requests.
A Denial of Service attack consists of sending an unusually large number of fake data packets or requests to a server. If the attack is powerful enough, the target server will consume its available resources in an attempt to process the bogus packets and will eventually become unresponsive for legit users. In order to make it harder to block, such an attack can be simultaneously launched from multiple sources, in which case it is known as a Distributed Denial of Service attack or DDoS.
Anonymous is a group of hacktivists, which led an aggressive campaign against the Church of Scientology in 2008 that culminated in serious death threats end even acts of vandalism. The group's origin can be traced back to the infamous /b/ board on 4chan.org, the birth place of many Internet memes and pranks, however, according to some accounts, the two are no longer related.
Dmitriy Guzner, 19, of Verona, New Jersey, is already
serving a one-year prison sentence for his role in the same DDoS attack that impaired the normal functionality of CoS websites for days. According to a
press release from United States Attorney's Office for the Central District of California, Mr. Mettenbrink has agreed to a similar sentence and will plead guilty in front of a federal judge next week.
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