Hackers hit Scientology with online attack

by Robert McMillan

January 27, 2008 —

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.

Shortly after it was hit with the DDOS flood, the Scientology.org Web site
was moved to a server hosted by Prolexic Technologies, according to data
compiled by Netcraft, an Internet monitoring company. Prolexic specializes in
protecting companies from DDOS attacks.

A Prolexic spokeswoman confirmed that the Church of Scientology is one of the
company's clients, but declined to offer more details on the matter. The Church
of Scientology did not answer questions relating to the online attacks, but
in a statement it said that the controversy over the Tom Cruise video had driven
traffic to its Web site.

The secretive Church of Scientology's practices, including its efforts to use
copyright law to restrict the dissemination of information about the church,
have engendered a lot of criticism within the Internet community. But one Web
site set up to criticize Scientology -- called Operation Clambake -- called
the DDOS attacks a bad idea. "Attacking Scientology like that will just
make them play the religious persecution card," wrote
Andreas Heldal-Lund, the Web site's owner. "They will use it to defend
their own counter actions when they try to shatter criticism and crush critics
without mercy."

If publicity was Anonymous' ultimate goal, the group has had some success.
Late in the day Friday, seven of the top 10 stories on the Digg.com
news-linking site related to Scientology or to Anonymous' communiques.

Although the group's Web page exhorts participants to "begin bumping Digg,"
Anonymous did not manipulate the news site's promotional algorithm system, which
determines which stories get top billing, according to Digg CEO Jay Adelson.

"They must have done a very good job of bringing in a diverse set of interests,"
he said. "It just happened to hit a nerve that the Digg community was interested
in."

It is unusual for Digg's front page to be so dominated by a single topic, but
not unprecedented, Adelson said. Last year's shootings at Virginia Tech and
the 2005 terrorist bombings in London achieved a comparable level of coverage.
"In the history of Digg, there's no question that the topic of Scientology
has been of great interest to the community," he said. "I can't explain
why."

IDG News Service