web hacker faces up to 10 years

13 May 2009

A 19-year-old American man faces up to 10 years in jail after pleading guilty to knocking the Church of Scientology's website offline in a series of online DDoS attacks in January last year.

The DDoS attacks began on January 19 and managed to knock the Scientology.org website offline by hitting it with several bursts of unwanted internet traffic. The attack flooded the site with as much as 220Mb per second of traffic.

Dmitriy Guzner, of New Jersey, was part of Anonymous - an underground hacking group that has made the church a target of several attacks. Guzner had been expected to enter a guilty plea when he was charged last October, but it was not formally entered until Monday.

On computer hacking charges he faces up to ten years in prsion and is set to be sentenced on August 24.

Anonymous promoted the incident with several YouTube videos.

"For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind and for our own enjoyment, we shall proceed to expel you from the internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form," a computerised voice says in one Anonymous video.

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