Dmitriy Guzner campaigned against Scientology under the ‘Anonymous’ banner. And while he campaigned without a name, he may soon be gaining a number – in prison.

The 19-year-old Guzner has become the first member of the ‘Anonymous’ group to be convicted of online attacks against supporters of Scientology. He has pleaded guilty to computer hacking charges and now faces up to 10 years imprisonment.

Strictly speaking, Guzner did not ‘hack into’ the scientology.org WEb site during the attacks in January 2008. Instead he carried on distributed denial of service attacks in which computers are rigged up to make repeated demands on a Web site until it is no longer able to respond to legitimate visits and effectively crashes. At one stage Guzner was causing the sites to attempt to transfer 220Mb of traffic per second.

It appears Guzner acted alone in the attacks, with a spokesman for the Department of Justice telling the LA Times that, “He was the guy.” That’s an ironic choice of words given that the Anonymous group is better known for public protests where members dress up in Guy Fawkes-style masks, similar to those in the movie V For Vendetta. (Pictured, courtesy David Shankbone.)

At the time of the attacks, a security engineer described the scale of the attacks to PCWorld as “probably about in the middle of attack sizes” and said there must have been some degree of organization: “It’s not just one or two guys hanging out in the university dorms doing this.” The same engineer noted there were a total of 488 attacks in the space of a week. The longest attack lasted for just under two hours.

Although Guzner only entered his plea this week, he told officials of his intention to do so last October. This meant officials did not have to go through the full process of preparing a case, which could make him eligible for a considerably lighter sentence than if he had pleaded not guilty.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 4:22 pm under Hacking, Legal.

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