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A New Jersey man has admitted he participated in January's high-profile cyber attack on the Church of Scientology that took its website offline and caused as much as $70,000 worth of damage.

Dmitriy Guzner, 18, of Verona, New Jersey, helped carry out the crippling distributed denial of service (DDoS) assault because he believed it furthered the goals of the anti-Scientology group "Anonymous," to which he claimed to belong, according to court documents filed in federal court. He has agreed to plead guilty to a single felony charge of unauthorized impairment of a protected computer.

He agreed to pay $37,500 in restitution, a fee he is "jointly and severally liable" for with others who participated in the attack. He faces a maximum of 10 years in federal prison. A sentencing hearing has not been scheduled. Guzner is a student who participated in, but did not organize, the attacks, said his attorney, Jeffrey Chabrowe, of The Branch Law Firm in New York.

The attacks, which at times rendered Scientology's website unreachable, were said to be in retaliation for its misuse of copyright and trademark law in censorship of criticism against the church. The DDoS attacks, which take websites offline by bombarding them with more traffic than they can handle, were largely unsophisticated brute force, floods, security experts have said.

The Church of Scientology responded by moving its systems to a managed service run by security firm Prolexic.

Full article here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10...s_guilty_plea/