Web hackers don’t always double as the best marksmen.
Case in point: Dutch school kids are now being dubbed collateral damage in the war being waged online against the Church of Scientology.
Yep. School kids. Ryan Singel of Wired’s Threat Level blog revealed recently that a moderator, screen name Splongcat, of the Internet forum 711chan.org, misdirected a DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attack intended to take down the server of the Church of Scientology to instead compromise the Web presence of the Etty Hillesum Lyceum, an academic establishment for youth in the Netherlands.
Apparently Splongcat had failed to input the correct server address into the software shared to accomplish the attack. The result: the EHL was barraged while things were pretty much smooth sailing at the COS. Tisk, tisk, we say to the amateurish error.
Good news, though. Etty Hillesum recuperated fairly quickly thereafter, and received an apology from the assault’s chief engineer for the error. Evidently, Splongcat didn’t check the IP for authenticity prior to zero hour.
For those not in the know, an “official” war against the Church of Scientology began this month (launched January 16th) in order to “protest its use of copyright law to take down material (on the Web) critical of the church’s bizarre practices.”
How is the effort going, you ask? Well, apart from the slip-up noted here, it’s moving along. It’s been getting plenty of Diggs. That’s something, right?