The Church of Scientology, whom has their worldwide headquarters near St Petersburg Florida, in Clearwater Florida, has has their official web site hacked. On Jan 19th a group of hackers, naming themselves “Anonymous” knocked the Church’s Web site offline with a distributed denial-of-service attack.
A “Distributed Denial of Service” (DDOS), attack is one of the most common types of attacks against well guarded web sites, servers and computer systems. When it’s an attack against a web site, it involves having millions of computers request a web page over ad over again. So many of these requests come in that the machine that hosts this file cannot keep up with these requests and does nothing. It’s hard to block because of the distributed part, which means it not several computers in one location but computers from all over the world.
How do they get people from all over the world to sit in front of their computers and request pages from the same web site over and over again? They don’t! That where spyware, viruses and trojans come into play. Software containing these forms of malware are installed on millions of computers all around the world when their users install them unknowingly by opening the wrong e-mail attachment, visiting the wrong web site or installing software that has been knowingly (or unknowingly) infected with these programs. This malware then gives the infected computer to start requesting a certian web page over and over again starting on a certain date (usually).

Oh on top of installing it accidentally these users also have to have no firewall or a poor firewall (like Windows Defender - worst in the business), poor or no antivirus software (like Norton’s - used to be good but now it sucks), AND not ever check for spyware using anti-spyware software like Spybot (best in the business and it’s free). Sadly there are millions of people who believe that the big names in computer security like Microsoft, McAffee’s and Nortons are the best at protecting their computer. Sadly they are the worst and even distribute spyware themselves.

As of the time of writing this, one week later, their web site still seems to be suffering from this DDOS attack. While pages are available for viewing, they frequently time-out or take several minutes to load.

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