Teenage hacker admits Scientology cyber-attack

LOS ANGELES (AFP) — A teenager hacker has admitted carrying out a cyber attack that crashed Church of Scientology websites as part of a campaign by a mysterious underground group, justice officials said Friday.

Dmitriy Guzner, 18, of New Jersey will plead guilty to computer hacking for his role in launching a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Scientology websites in January this year, the Justice Department said.

DDOS attacks occur when websites are overwhelmed by a large volume of malicious Internet traffic, making the sites unavailable to legitimate users.

According to information filed in federal court in Los Angeles, Guzner described himself as a member of a shadowy Internet-based group known as "Anonymous" that has carried out a series of protests against Scientology.

A statement released by the Justice Department in Los Angeles said Guzner would formally plead guilty in "coming weeks" at a court in New Jersey. He faces up to 10 years in federal prison.

Founded in the United States in 1954 by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, the Church of Scientology, which has attracted Hollywood stars such as Tom Cruise, was recognized as a religion there 20 years later.

Source: AFP

Recommendation : let me explain what is DDOS it considered as short for Distributed Denial of Service, it is an attack where multiple compromised systems (which are usually infected with a Trojan) are used to target a single system causing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Victims of a DDoS attack consist of both the end targeted system and all systems maliciously used and controlled by the hacker in the distributed attack. The kid, just 18 years old have to spend next 10 years of his life in prison he would loose so many thing up the time he'll be release just because of hacking.