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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."
against them. Its high time these scammers got whats coming. Its time for a new age of reason! inspiring eh?
Yep no tears for him.
But what counts as "Unauthorized impairment of a protected computer"?
DRM that stops your OS or drives from working properly?
I guess they're not as anonymous as they thought. This anti-scientology campaign is well meant, but they should really try harder not to get caught.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What exactly is well meant by it?
It seems that a crazy cult acts in a legalistic way they don't like, so a bunch of self-appointed web police lower themselves to behave in exactly same way they are decrying.
Just because you disagree with a group (as I do, in this case) does not mean that you can DDoS them. That is not your right, and the law says that you should be punished. If you want to take the moral high ground (in your opinion), prepare for the legal consequences.
a bunch of foolish kids with nothing better to do than form a mob, and be outraged at the freedom to be foolish and join another mob.
irony floats off, unnoticed.
the united states is a nation of laws; badly written and randomly enforced -- frank zappa
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?
Anyone have a link to the creepy Tom Cruise video?
Xenu made me do it Your Honor. I plead not guilty by reason of following commands of the Galactic Overlord. Hail Xenu!
scientology is not a religion, it's a business. if you want to drive them out of business, compete with them. make up a story that is even crazier to woo film stars and rake in the big rewards.
Join the just founded Roflology. we believe that God, who actually DID create the earth, was in turn created by a being named GLaDOS, an artificial intelligence from the future which traveled back in time, to the moment before time was about to be created. since then, many men are being born with a device attached to the inside of their noses called the Super-Human-Inhibition-Transponder, which, as the name suggests, inhibits superhuman abilities that men actually possess, like reading minds, seeing into the future and doing the dishes. This device powers itself from the resonant properties of metal threads in paper sheets, which come disguised as dollar or euro bills.
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Do one of our tests today to find out whether you are full of S.H.I.T.!
Do not trust this signature.
Scientology is bad compared to...?
Sanity.
To the best of my knowledge, the DDOS attacks stopped in January. The people who are currently protesting are not using those methods.
You can check out what they are up to at
http://forums.scientology-exposed.com/
http://forums.whyweprotest.net/
To find out why people are still protesting start reading the stories here
http://www.forum.exscn.net/forumdisplay.php?f=2
http://www.exscientologykids.com/voicesinunison.html
Former scientologists are finally starting to have the courage to speak out and need to be supported.
In my home town alone, a former scientologist's apartment has been broken into & had file boxes stolen (left the TV, DVDs & laptop), slashed her car tires, cut the wires in her car (including the brake lights), ran her off the road, stalked her at the neighborhood swimming pool & tried to intimidate her there with her kids, have been trying to mentally fuck with her by turning off her circuit breakers for her apartment, have had vans & PIs staking out her home & following her.
These are not nice people. They need to be exposed.
fair enough that this guy is being convicted, but is a prison sentence really fair for a DDoS attack?
charge somebody with inciting violence, why we charge Scientology with with inciting this guy to commit this horrendous "crime"?
What?
Actually, I doubt that any campaign needs this kind of an asshat in the first place. It just creates the image of Scientology being the innocent victims, and their opponents being a bunch of criminals. We can do without that kind of making martyrs.
E.g., no offense, but you seem to do that generalization yourself when you paint the whole campaign as needing to try to not get caught. I'm not saying that to pick on you, but just to illustrate the kind of association that gets made. If even you, presumably a smart guy, fall for that kind of guilt by association, imagine how much easier that is for someone who understands computers and scientology even less.
Seriously, read any advocacy FAQ (e.g., start with the Linux one) and you'll see that all progress is actually made by the people who keep a professional and helpful attitude about it. Rabid zealots and asshat script kiddies are the kind you _don't_ want your movement to be associated with, because it ruins your whole credibility. That kind of "friends" are literally worse than your enemies.
And in this case it also ruins the whole moral high ground aspect. This guy infected (or help create a market for infecting) a bunch of innocent people's computers, and stuffed their internet connection to do his DDOS attack. That's actual harm done to innocents. It's an evil act. Once you show that kind of lack of morals or of respect for your fellow human, you just don't have a high ground from which to look down upon scientology.
If you will, it's a bit like reading about Mao denouncing the Soviet Union leaders. You're not inclined to rally on his side, because he's an evil fuck himself. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is still a sociopathic prick.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I want you to get mad! I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!
He should get a medal instead.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Now here is a cult I am much more scared of.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYEnDepMKwE
anyone can link to his website ? does it have a paypal button ?
Read radical news here
I think a brief timeline is in order for the purpose of clarifying exactly this guy's relationship to "Anonymous."
Prank calls and DDoS attacks "for teh lulz" > realization that Scientology is indeed creepy enough to legitimately oppose > legal protests
So the DDoS itself was probably not a part of the "Anonymous" coalition. It did, however, play a part in galvanizing the movement and generating media attention. But it was only after such events (shortly after) that the people watching who would become part of "Anonymous" started doing their research and getting interested. This guy may have had good intentions, but nothing can excuse such lawbreaking. After all, lawbreaking is the domain of the Church of Scientology, and we wouldn't want to step on their toes.
I never understood how he made that mistake. It's standard Anonymous procedure in such operations to be behind at least 7 proxies.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Aside from the obvious fact that Scientology is a cult, I really wish they'd stop referring to fucking packet kiddies as 'hackers'. Most of them (and I'll bet this kid is no different) don't even fall in line with the definition of cracker or hacker. They're just children with buttons.
"a mysterious underground group"
How scary! Sounds like puffery by law enforcement trying to justify spending so much time and money to track down one script-kiddy. Strange how they never get off their butts when it's Scientology that's doing the cyber-attacks.
Here's a tip for the FBI and SS: you can find hundreds of these mysterious underground people peacefully picketing outside Scientology franchises at this very moment.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
5 years in a real prison is appropriate for this type of behavior. It's very disruptive and denies others their rights to communicate and to use the systems and connections that they are paying for.
I can't stand Scientology at all. That said, vigilante censorship is just plain wrong. There is no excuse for this type of asshattery whatsoever. My position would be exactly the same if it were Scientology DDOS-ing him.
Freedom of speech and religion don't just apply to popular speech and religions, they apply to everyone. It's great to argue against their points, expose their agendas, and debate. It's not okay to ever try to forcibly shut them down.
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.
It isn't that hard to find idiots even when it's a requirement they also be Islamic. Consider Nicky Riley, also known as "Mohammad Rashid Saeed-Alim".
In my experience with Anonymous, the ones who do the stupid shit are also typically the ones that enjoy bragging about it online.
Posting non-Anon for karma bonus and also because I've got nothin' to hide. :3
~ C.
You... really don't know Anonymous at all, do you? Read /b/ on 4chan for an hour or so, if you can bear it. That is Anonymous.
Right now on the front page of that imageboard is a photograph of some girl and the challenge 'Count to 10 and I'll post the full set of her newds', a photograph of another girl and the question 'Would /b/ hit it?', a drawing of a gorilla and the challenge 'Write a proper haiku displaying your distaste for black people', two topless women and a request for porn site passwords, a comic strip of Sakura sucking off Gaara, an old copy-paste flame, two threads consisting of some guy fishing for approval of his looks, a whole thread in which people are just repeating the word 'wat', a nude of some girl on a sofa along with a request for porn, a thread about The Game (which you just lost by the way), someone asking for shock pics to set as someone's wallpaper as a prank, Ben Franklin for some bloody reason, and a thread requesting Rule 34 (that's porn in case you couldn't guess) of some character I don't recognise.
In what possible way could Scientology slander these people?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Blocking access to a website has pretty high costs, the examples I used where obvious examples of lost revenue but although sites with no obvious means of generating income may not be seen to be affected in any way other than inconvenience by downtime, they can still be effected indirectly, either from interested parties being turned away or from a bad reputation being gained.
You know DDOS have ramifications far beyond simple "just a kid having some fun" when organised crime use it to extort money.
scientology is not a religion, it's a business. if you want to drive them out of business, compete with them.
Scientology likes to pretend they are a religion, which holds them back. They're not keeping up with scientific progress. The "E-meter" measures skin resistance, the least useful component of a polygraph. By now, they should have some wireless, Bluetooth-enabled device that reads pulse, respiration, and, for tradition's sake, skin resistance. Someday brainwave monitoring might be added. If you have those measurements, you can read stress relatively well, especially once you have a baseline for the individual. This would allow "auditing" via the Internet. I wonder if Apple would allow a Scientology app for the iPhone.
In other words, Scientology needs a hardware/software upgrade, and they can't do one because they're a "revealed religion".
Another piece of software Scientology should have out is described in Hubbard's "How to Live though an Executive". This is a book on business organization, of all things. There's a whole communication system described, much like a trouble ticket system. It's basically a system to make sure that when something is ordered, it actually gets done. Successful completion is checked off within the system, but by third parties, not the ones doing the work, while trouble reports float upward. It's a bit rigid for use in some organizations, but it might be useful for, say, people running big equipment farms and networks. But it's 1940s technology, with forms and boards and hooks and rubber stamps and carbon copies. You'd think that Scientology would have this available as an online service. But no, they don't. As far as I know, they don't even use such a system in-house. Again, they've failed to keep up with the technology.
Scientology has a "Religious Technology Center", but it's not an R&D operation. It's more like a cross between the RIAA and the Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the doctrine enforcement unit of the Vatican). They're stuck with Hubbard's technology: "With all Scientology churches bound to minister Dianetics and Scientology technologies in full compliance with their trademark licenses, the entire hierarchy up to the Church of Scientology International is self-correcting and ensures pure and orthodox Scientology. ... RTC investigates any departures from that standard administration and ensures that orthodoxy is restored."
They do have competition, in a sense. There's the "est" - Forum - Landmark operation, which has been lightly brainwashing people since the 1970s. It's been called a cult, but it's more like Amway. There were more things like that back in the 1970s, but most of the people vulnerable to that sort of thing seem to have gone off to the Christian right, so the market for such cults is down.
such as fair game, you would consider it your moral duty to destroy scientology for being the freedom destroying fungal growth that it is
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology)
scientology standard operating procedure
if we stomach the punishment of this guy for the ddos attack, in the name of fairness and morality, do we not destroy scientology for doing far worse on multiple occasions?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"As much as I hate DRM, if you didn't read the fine-print then that's your own fault."
:).
So I can write malware as long as it has fine-print that's similarly as accessible?
I'm sure some malware authors will be very happy if that's all it takes to make it legal.
Given the amount of people who click-through stuff (just to play that cool flash game etc), there'll be tons of legally installed rootkits and spam zombies
If I were that evil, I'd be doing that then.
Did Sony's CDs come with fine print? And did the fine print mention what would be impaired? If it did not then who went to jail for 12-18 months as a result of the Sony CD malware?
This lands for me like most anti-other-culture polemic speech, particularly anti-other-religion. Religion in general has produced more hate than any other aspect of human culture. Even though war is all about money and power, it's religion that has supported war for those who don't stand to gain any money or power from the war, i.e., popular support.
It's the old "us and them" argument writ large. Every human being has experienced some version of this, but it tends to die off without ritual reinforcement.
I agree that clitoral "circumcision" (often the crude removal of the entire physical structure) is ridiculously cruel and occurs as unusual for anyone not steeped in that culture. There are examples of outrageous behaviour influenced and supported by every religion, though. It just so happens that this practice is one of, if not the most extreme instances.
It's the very paradigm of anti-female behavior in the name of a deity.
Compare and contrast the Hindus, who believe that more female orgasms imply a better world. Funny thing, this hasn't exempted them from turning to war; in fact, the very first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita is set on a battlefield.
That is, I find it genuinely tragic that young women are deprived of pleasure from sex, almost certainly before they've experienced it. By comparison, the wholesale slaughter of human beings regardless of sex in war is pathetic. The high irony is that war is couched in metaphors which suggest honor, glory, and other high morality.
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."