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Scientology Attacker Gets A Little Less Anonymous

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How do you handle a group of unidentified people who belong to a loosely-defined protest group that grew out of an online community best known for dark humor and shock tactics? It looks like the answer might be “grab them one at a time.”

CNN reports that Brian Thomas Mettenbrink may plead guilty to charges of committing cyber attacks against the Church of Scientology’s Web sites. CNN links Mettenbrink to the group Anonymous. According to the report, Mettenbrink said he downloaded software from an Anonymous message board that would allow him to commit a denial of service (DoS) attack against the church’s Web servers.

There are a few ways to commit a DoS attack, but the most common is to use a program to send millions of requests to a target Web server. The server gets bogged down trying to respond to all the requests and either slows to a crawl or crashes as a result.

CNN also states that Anonymous announced it would use the Internet to attack the church back in 2008. That’s a surprise to me. I used to read the Anonymous message boards (anyone could do so and everyone was anonymous) and two things stood out to me. The first was that there was no central leadership in the group (though certain voices seemed to carry more weight than others). To call Anonymous an organization is almost misleading — while the group had a general mission to protest alleged practices of the Church of Scientology, there seemed to be no formal leadership in place. People would propose an action and others would debate the worth of the proposal. If enough people thought it made sense they would move forward. It was nearly democratic to the point of anarchy.

The second thing that struck me was that many (possibly the majority) of the people on the message board urged the group to stay within legal boundaries. Tactics like cyber attacks, harassment and vandalism were frowned upon. Most members seemed to favor protests and activism that brought attention to the goals of Anonymous without breaking the law.

But because of Anonymous’s nature, I suppose it’s no surprise that not everyone felt that a law-abiding approach was best. And because several members of Anonymous came from communities like 4chan’s /b/ channel, where causing mischief is not only allowed but encouraged, I guess it was inevitable that some members would take it upon themselves to become a real nuisance to the Church of Scientology. I’m sure some of these people shared ideals with the larger population of the group just as I’m sure some of them were only involved because they enjoyed causing mayhem.

While CNN mentions a YouTube video attributed to Anonymous that calls for Internet attacks directed at the church, I feel it’s necessary to point out anyone could make such a video. Such a person may or may not be part of Anonymous. Even if the person did belong to Anonymous, it’s impossible to say that he or she spoke for the group as a whole because Anonymous has no central voice. This both protects and hinders the group.

I don’t know what side of the fence Mettenbrink is on — activist or troll. I haven’t visited an Anonymous message board for quite some time. Perhaps the group as a whole has turned to using more combative tactics. Or perhaps a smaller group of troublemakers, some sincere and some just “in it for the lulz,” are making moves on behalf of an organization that can’t clear its own name because of its very nature.


Posted in TechStuff Tagged: anonymous, cyber crime, denial of service attacks, DoS attacks, Scientology, YouTube

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