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Hacker Admits To Scientology DDoS Attack
lbwbl writes with news that a New Jersey man will plead guilty to one felony count of 'unauthorized impairment of a protected computer' for his distributed denial of service attacks on Scientology websites as part of 'Anonymous' earlier this year. From Wired:
"He faces a likely sentence of 12 to 18 months in prison based on stipulations in his plea agreement, which also obliges him to pay $37,500 in restitution. ... Friday's case, in US District Court in Los Angeles, marks the first prosecution of an Anonymous member for a series of attacks against the Church of Scientology that began in mid-January. The secretive religious group strayed into Anonymous' sights after trying to suppress the publication of a creepy Tom Cruise video produced for Scientology members."
I can't see how this guy got caught. If he was running a botnet over IRC, he should have been able to simply log in, issue commands for which target to attack, and disconnect. Or was he posting copy and paste scripts on the chans who then divulged his IP to the feds? Seems like the majority of Anonymous are idiots. Recently, we have the guy using cTunnel to access Palin's email account, when he could have easily used TOR and had essentially 0% chance of being caught, or if that's to hard, at least multiple web-based proxies. Anyway, I'm curious to know how this guy got nailed. Does anyone have any info on how they tracked him down?
Will someone help protect me against the free-trade exploit tool (DMCA takedown notice) that I'm told the church would use against me if/when I try to sell my E-meter on Ebay?
The E-meter isn't a fake or an unauthorized copy.
I remember a chapter in a text for a health class in junior high school. The topic was "Quacks," and the direction was to "beware of them." I remember being interested in the first view of doctors I'd seen that didn't portray them as completely trustworthy and somehow authoritarian.
One section described a particularly heinous form of quackery that involved "gizmos purported to measure the electrical charge on the surface of the skin." This seemed outrageous to me. Electricity on the skin??? Obviously this was a big-time scam. These gizmos were obviously fakes; I could tell just by reading the damning text and staring at the weird black and white photos.
I thought about this from time to time as I grew up, especially when I learned about the vast array of electrical charges and how ubiquitous electricity is. I still held onto this strange form of pity for those who had fallen for the scams of these quacks and their bogus gizmos. Something about the tone of the textbook made the whole thing seem very dangerous, e.g., there were people spending all of their money on something that couldn't possibly work. And what if they had a serious ailment which was being ignored in favor of the, the ... quackery !!!
Well, a few years ago, when the Scientology documents were exposed to the public, I perused them out of curiosity. Even though I knew about Xenu, I was still surprised to see it all there in print. Then I ran across the man's story of getting to some advanced Thetan level, and he described the self-auditing with the e-meter. Something in his narrative caused the neurons in my own brain to fire just so, and I realized that this was what was being described in the textbook.
I think it would be interesting to research how detectable electrical currents in the human body relate to physical, mental, even emotional processes. I believe it's dangerous to toss around half-baked notions of the same, in exchange for money and time, based on the ramblings of a science fiction author on alcohol and barbiturates.
I mean, the guy should have been on psilocybin, or mescaline. Alcohol and other depressants are cruel drugs.
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."
You know, the protests in the 60's were also full of "foolish kids" but they changed the world in many ways for the better. I don't see anything wrong with people banding together to fight against evil. I don't condone what this kid did but in every movement there are bad apples which are not representative of the group. Anonymous is unlike anything the world has ever seen before and they are fighting against an evil Space Opera Cult. God Speed Anonymous.