Hackers Attack Scientology Site to Get it Offline

A band of hackers identifying itself as "Anonymous" has attacked the Website of the Church of Scientology (COS) with the intention to shut it down.

The online attack was hurled January 19, 2008 and since then, the hacker group has been trying to draw media's attention intending to protect people from Scientology by turning around the site's brainwashing content, according to a Web page of Anonymous.

Reports say that Anonymous hit the Website of the Church with a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. In this, computers send massive number of requests to the victimized server, flooding it with so much data that it can knock the server offline. Just as the name suggests, Anonymous keeps its members' identities closed.

Anonymous posted a video on YouTube, which said that its members would proceed to banish the Website of the Church of Scientology and systematically destroy its current form. SCMagazineUS published this in news on January 28, 2008.

According to reports, the Church quickly responded by issuing a statement that said the attacks had defaced several of COS sites rendering them inoperable. AHN published this in news on January 30, 2008.

Senior Security and Software Engineer, Jose Nazario, for Arbor Networks said via his blog posting on January 28, 2008 that since January 26 2008, security researchers detected 488 DDoS-type attacks aimed at the Church of Scientology, with a mean of 15,000 packets in a second. SCMagazineUS published this in news on January 28, 2008.

Ken Pappas, Security Strategist at Top Layer Networks, said that it could be possible that the hacker clan Anonymous is using botnets for its dismantling operation, as reported by SCMagazineUS on January 28, 2008.

Pappas also said that there is scope to bring the bot-infected computers under anyone's ownership, while the machines are already controlled and used to launch attack against the church's website from 50,000 computers simultaneously.

Reports say that the hacker group Anonymous seems to have gained publicity as per its wish. But it didn't manipulate Digg.com, the news site that determines billing for top stories, according to Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg. PCWorld published this in news on January 26, 2008.

Related article: Hackers Redirect Windows Live Search to Malicious Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 2/6/2008