Andy Millar

A hacker group calling themselves Anonymous have declared war on Scientology.

In their declaration of war, posted on YouTube, Anonymous claim:

“With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders has been made clear to us.

“Anonymous has therefore decided that your organisation should be destroyed, for the good of your followers, for the good of mankind, and for our own enjoyment.

“We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”

Organized by an online Forum and IRC Channel, Anonymous have been launching denial of service attacks on various Scientology websites. Names and contact details of Church of Scientology members have been circulated to Anonymous members.

Comprising predominantly of Script Kiddies who appear to be students (one member using the online handle xenubuster left this morning to take an exam), the Anonymous “members” download a Denial of Service script and run it from their home computer. The group contains users who have done this sort of attack from home before and have been contacted by their ISPs.

Using standard Denial of Service attacks, Anonymous appear to have been successful in temporarily taking some Scientology sites offline, but no serious damage appears to have been done.

Last night, the group was using a simple UDP flood to try and disable the DNS servers responsible for some Scientology web sites. This morning, one member of the group using the online handle xenubuster claimed “not even the industry really know how we’re doing what we’re doing“!

Anonymous have published a Long Term Strategy for their attack that suggests that their next stage involves IRL (in real life) bombardment of the Church of Scientology. They also suggest publishing this flier in areas known to have Church of Scientology members.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Geekery, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.