Hackers Take Out Scientology Web Site
Well, it looks like the war is on. The Church of Scientology's attempts to squash circulation of a video of Tom Cruise last week seem to have been the final straw for a group that calls itself "Anonymous." According to a recent report in Wired, the cryptically-named organization recently stated that its main goal is to destroy the leadership of the Church of Scientology.
The first public salvo was launched over the past couple of days as a group of hackers claiming affiliation with Anonymous took down the home page of the Church with repeated distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. DDOS attacks flood target servers with requests, so that they become overwhelmed with data and shut down. This results in a site that doesn't work, which is exactly what visitors to the Scienology Web site experienced during the attack. The attacks flooded Scientology's Web servers with as much as 220 megabits per-second, which security experts claim is a mid-sized attack.
While this attack is not the largest of its kind ever seen, it does show some level of organization, "It's not just one or two guys hanging out in the university dorms doing this," said Jose Nazario, a senior security engineer with Arbor Networks. The church has since moved its site to servers run by Prolexic Technologies, a company that specialized in protection from DDOS attacks.
From Wired (via InfoWorld)
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