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Distributed denial of service: Church under DDoS attack

Websites associated with the Church of Scientology have come under a sustained and coordinated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in recent weeks after an internet group calling itself Anonymous declared war on the controversial organisation.

In a statement posted via video on YouTube and through various internet sites Anonymous claimed its actions were designed to safeguard the right to freedom of speech against assaults by the Church of Scientology. It also wants to curtail what it claims are the financial exploitation of church members and aims to "systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology" in its present form.

Anonymous justifies its actions by alleging the Church of Scientology has misused copyright and trademark law in censoring criticism against the church. The campaign was sparked off by the church's attempts to remove a promotional video featuring Scientologist Tom Cruise from YouTube. The clip features a video from Cruise's Freedom Medal ceremony from late 2004 in which the actor speaks with (frankly scary) intensity about the responsibilities of being a Scientologist.

Pressure group adopts DDoS tactics to make political point

This latest use of DDoS is a significant move away from the typical commercial blackmail motive behind most of the attacks in the past. In this case the issue is more a point of principle and the group behind it is claiming to be working to protect free speech. Anonymous has a broader agenda beyond attacking Church of Scientology web sites. As well as directing sympathisers to download and use denial of service software, the group calls on its members to make nuisance calls, host Scientology documents the Church claims as protected by copyright, and fax black pages to the Church's fax machines in an effort to waste ink.

Using DDoS tactics to disrupt a global quasai-religious organisation bears some similarities to the widely reported problem suffered last year by the former Russian satellite country Estonia. During the attack the country's major banks and institutions were taken down causing significant disruption for the general population, allegedly as a form of political point scoring.

In effect both these attacks amounted to a form of censorship and an attempt to prevent freedom of speech- despite the claims to the contrary by Anonymous, a worrying development in the history of cyber security issues and something that governments and public organisations need to consider for the long term protection of their Web based infrastructures.

Webscreen - answer to Botnet DDoS prevention

One technology that would have been able to minimise the impact of both these attacks is the Webscreen WS Series network security appliance. Webscreen monitors all Web traffic looking for the typical patterns that indicate an attack is underway. Most DDoS attacks use armies of hijacked computers - Botnets - to launch simultaneous connection requests to a target Web site to overwhelm the server's resources. Webscreen filters out this type of traffic from the legitimate activity to prevent the sites from being taken off line.

Webscreen has been protecting many of the world's busiest Web sites since 2001 and can be contacted on 0870 3899 0022