October 20th, 2008
Anonymous member pleas guilty in Scientology attack
Anonymous held an anti-Scientology protest in Hollywood in March. Photo by Jason Mouratides (scragz).
A member of the Anonymous collective will plead guilty to mounting a distributed denial of service attack on Scientology websites. Dmitiriy Guzner, 18, has agreed to the guilty plea on one count of unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. He faces 12 to 18 months and restitution of $37,500.
Nice way to start a life. Wired reports that this is the first prosecution of Anonymous members for waves of DDoS attacks on Scientology servers.
Other tactics included swamping phone lines with crank calls and sending black fax pages to Scientology offices. A core group graduated to real-world demonstrations outside of Scientology centers, where they were joined by mainstream critics of the church, who largely mistook Anonymous as an anti-Scientology group, rather than anti-everything.
According to court papers, Guzner “knowingly caused the transmission of information, codes and commands and as a result of such conduct, intentionally and without authorization caused damage by impairing the integrity and availability of data, a program, a system and information on a computer system that was used in interstate and foreign commerce and communications, specifically websites belonging to the Church of Scientology, thereby causing loss to one or more persons aggregating at least $5,000 in value[...]”
