Hackers hit Scientology with online attack

A group of hackers calling itself "Anonymous" has hit the Church
of Scientology's Web site
with an online attack.

The attack was launched Jan. 19 by Anonymous, which is seeking media attention
to help "save people from Scientology by reversing the brainwashing,"
according to a Web
page maintained by Anonymous.

Anonymous claims to have knocked the Church's Web site offline with a distributed
denial-of-service attack, in which many computers bombard the victim's server
with requests, overwhelming it with data in the hope of ultimately knocking
the system offline. True to its name, Anonymous does not disclose the true identities
of its members.

The attacks were spurred by the Church's efforts to remove video
of movie star Tom Cruise professing his admiration for the religion, according
to an Anonymous video
manifesto posted to Youtube.

"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 creepy computerized
voice states in the video. Anonymous followed up this dispatch with a second
video blasting the media for failing to completely report the group's criticisms
of the church. This video was taken down Friday by Youtube, citing a "terms
of use violation."

Anonymous has managed to generate a measurable attack against the Scientology.org
Web site. Over the past few days, the site was hit with several DDOS (distributed
denial-of-service) attacks, which flooded it with as much as 220M bps of traffic,
according to Jose Nazario, a senior security engineer with Arbor Networks, whose
company compiles data on Internet attacks.

The Anonymous campaign shows some level of organization. "220M bps is
probably about in the middle of attack sizes," Nazario said. "It's
not just one or two guys hanging out in the university dorms doing this."

On average, the attacks lasted about 30 minutes and used up 168M bps of bandwidth.
In the past year, Arbor has seen attacks on other sites hit 40G bps, or 200
times the strength of the Anonymous event.

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