IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

A group of hackers, who go by the name of “Anonymous” and use IRC as their base, declared war against Scientology. The group has released texts online which Scientology members normally have to pay for. Also DDoS attacks on the 18th of January rendered the church’s website unusable.

The attacks followed after Scientology tried to censor a mockup movie picturing Tom Cruise, one of the most known members of the church. In the movie the actor laughs hysterically and makes claims Scientology members are the only people able to save life’s after car accidents.

John Bombard, a resident of Seminole, Florida, has been charged for his alleged attack on service provider Akamai two years ago. Several big companies were affected in the attack, such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and Symantec, the owner of SecurityFocus.

Bombard allegedly commanded the modified Gaobot botnet from an IRC server hosted his own domain f0r.org.

If found guilty, Bombard faces 2 years for each charge, and a fine of up to $400,000 USD.

In May 2004 IRC-Junkie reported about the ongoing problems for the IRCHighway network caused by DDoS. In June of this year Jason Michael Downey, known as Nessun and owner of the network Rizon, was arrested for these problems.

This PDF outlines the sentence Nessun heard on the 23rd of this month. We can read: “Jason Michael Downey, the operator of “bot network” of virus infected computers that he used to attack other computer systems, was sentenced to a year in federal prison today on his conviction for unlawful computer intrusion that caused over $20,000 in damages to other computer networks, United States Attorney Stephen J. Murphy announced today.”

Remarkable news released by researchers from McAfee this week. Baylor and Brown, researchers at McAfee warn that the national security of multiple countries are threatened by the existence of botnets.

“A botnet of one million bots, with a conservative 128 Kbps broadband upload speed per infected bot, can wield a powerful 128 gigabits of traffic,” the whitepaper reported. “This is enough to take most of the Fortune 500 companies (and several countries) offline using DDoS attacks. If several large botnets are allowed to join together, they could threaten the national infrastructure of most countries.”

Nessun, owner of the Rizon IRC network, has been named before on this website as source of DDoS attacks. IRC-Junkie was unaware that one of the three suspects reported about in the “FBI Arrests Three Botherders” article written 10 days ago, namely Jason Michael Downey, is in fact the same Nessun.

Downey, 24, has pleaded guilty for operating a botnet and computer fraud. Asking his reasons behind performing DDoS attacks U.S. District Judge Nancy G. Edmunds heard his reply: “I was doing it because I could, more than anything,” Downey replied. “It was a dumb thing to do.”