Dmitry Guzner will plead guilty to hacking attacks that brought down the Church of Scientology’s Web site.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed criminal charges against the 18-year-old New Jersey man, who is part of an underground hacking group called Anonymous. Guzner was charged Friday, and has agreed to plead guilty sometime in the next few weeks. He could spend up -to 10 years in prison on computer-hacking charges.
Guzner began launching attacks against the Church of Scientology’s Web site on Jan. 19. The defendant successfully took Scientology.org offline with a series of traffic surges to the site, known as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. According to computer security firm Arbor Networks, Guzner sent as much as 220 Mbps of traffic to Scientology.org, which was sufficient to temporarily disable the site.
Church Speaks Out
The Church of Scientology has been vocal about the case, saying, “Guzner admitted that he acted on behalf of Anonymous, an Internet hate group whose members have in recent years engaged in illegal threats, attacks, criminal harassment, and hate crimes against minorities, religions, media organizations, individuals and other groups in the form of terrorist threats and acts, bomb threats, death threats, acts of vandalism, Web site attacks, and computer hacking.”
Since January, the Church of Scientology said that Anonymous has been responsible for more than three million harassing e-mails and 141 million malicious hits against its Web sites, as well as 41 death threats, 56 bomb and arson threats, 103 threats of other violence, and 40 incidents of vandalism against church staff, executives, parishioners and/or facilities.
“The Church of Scientology is by no means the only target of this group,” the organization said. “Anonymous has also claimed responsibility for illegal attacks against MySpace, Fox News, The Epilepsy Foundation, prominent hip-hop Web sites, and many other groups and individuals. Some of…