We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

I think it’s time for /b/ to do something big. People need to understand not to fuck with /b/…
I’m talking about “hacking” or “taking down” the official Scientology website.
It’s time to use our resources to do something we believe is right.
It’s time to do something big again, /b/.
Talk amongst one another, find a better place to plan it, and then carry out what can and must be done.
It’s time, /b/.
Fellow /b/ posters were immediately dubious. “Yeah, good luck with this fail,” said one of the first to reply.
“A random image board cannot take down a pseudo-religion with the backing of wealthy people and an army of lawyers,” said another.
“Even if every person who has ever browsed /b/ ONCE joined in on a mass invasion it would still amount to nothing. Plus…they would
have 500 lawyers up their ass before they could say ‘litigation.’”
“4chan vs. scientology = M-M-MONSTER FAIL.”
“Can we take Mormonism next? Then Christianity?” another Anonymous poster asked sarcastically. “Then, if we really got balls, Islam?”
A few /b/ users who had a background in Scientology also defended the religious group: “Scientology isn’t fundamentally wrong or harmful
as a belief system,” one said.
The discussion continued, but soon the original, skeptical comments were drowned out by the comments of people who supported the OP.
It was as if the more /b/ thought about hitting Scientology in a big way, the more its users liked the idea. “You don’t get it do you,” said one.
“We are the anti-hero, we will do good, and fuck anyone, good or bad, who happens to be in the way.”
“This is the first step in something larger, something epic,” another agreed.
“We can do this,” said another. “We are Anon, and we are interwebs superheroes.”
Suddenly, the thread’s opinion was rushing toward all-out agreement on a raid. The initial skepticism and objections that /b/ was “not your
personal army” were forgotten by the now-zealous throng:
“We are thousands strong, they can’t sue all of us!”
“I say it’s time to stop talking about shitting dick nipples and do something even half-worth while, even if it IS just pissing off a bunch of
scam artists.”
“Future generations of /b/tards will look back to this as the day we fucked with batshit insane scientologists.”
“Let’s do it, /b/.”
“I have three computers. How can I help?” someone asked.
“Jesus will someone write the newfags some explanations on how to do a DDoS? And then we can get this shit underway.”
Before Anonymous emerged, DDoS attacks had been mostly confined to use by cyber criminals against financial websites or companies
from which they could extort money. But by 2008, it was already becoming one of the most popular forms of Anonymous attacks. Two
years earlier, /b/ users had been DDoSing the site of white nationalist radio host Hal Turner, temporarily knocking it offline. He later tried
suing 4chan, another image board called 7chan, and eBaum’s World, claiming thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs, with no success.
You could take part in a DDoS attack simply by downloading one of at least a dozen free software tools available on 4chan’s /rs/ board.
When enough people did so and flooded a target with junk traffic, the effect was like fifteen fat men trying to get through a revolving door at
the same time, according to an analogy by security writer Graham Cluley. Nothing could move. The result: legitimate visitors got an error
page when they visited the site, or their browser just kept loading. The downtime was always temporary—similar to when an online retailer
holds a 75 percent off sale and can’t handle the flood of visitors. This may seem trivial, since anyone who surfs the net has experienced a bad
connection and error pages. But downtime that lasts for hours or days can cost companies thousands in lost revenue or extra bandwidth cost.
Participating in a DDoS attack is also illegal, breaking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the United States as well as the 2006 Police and
Justice Act in the United Kingdom; in both countries, perpetrators face a maximum penalty of ten years in prison.
This, of course, rarely deterred /b/ and made raids seem more like a high-stakes game. With Scientology, participants agreed it was worth
getting the newfags on board to create an army and spread the word to the other Internet image boards, also known as “chans.” These
included 7chan, a popular image board for ex-/b/ users; GUROchan, an image board whose posts mainly consisted of gore; and Renchan, a
now-defunct site whose content bordered on pedophilia. 4chan needed to gather at least a thousand people, said one /b/ user on the stilldeveloping
Scientology thread that day, and who knew, they could probably find at least five thousand willing to fight for the cause.
People quickly got down to business. One /b/tard suggested “Phase one”: prank-calling the Dianetics hotline and rickrolling them, or asking
the call center “why there’s a volcano on the cover of Dianetics…generally bug the hell out of them.”
Another /b/tard instructed everyone to DDoS a list of Scientology sites. You could do this by simply visiting Gigaloader.com and inputting
a list of URLs that pointed to eight images on Scientology.org. The Gigaloader site (now defunct) was originally meant to stress-test a server,
but from as early as 2007 people figured out they could exploit it for DDoS-style attacks. You could enter several Web addresses for images
on a website, and Gigaloader would constantly reload the images in your browser—that would burden the image server and eat up the site’s
bandwidth, an effect multiplied by the number of people participating.
The best part was /b/ could include a message in the traffic that was being sent. In a separate incident, a webmaster whose website was
being hit by Gigaloader in 2007 said the traffic he was getting looked like this:
75.185.163.131 - - [27/Sep/2007:05:10:16 -0400] “GET /styles/xanime/top.jpg?
2346141190864713656_ANON_DOES_NOT_FORGIVE HTTP/1.1” 200 95852 “http://www.gigaloader.com/usermessage/ANON_DOES_NOT_FORGIVE”
“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7)
Gecko/20070914 Firefox/2.0.0.7”
In the case of Scientology.org, 4chan was sending the message “DDOS BY EBAUMSWORLD” to the church’s servers, part of a running
gag to blame 4chan’s antics on the rival, slightly tamer site. Once the thread’s participants started hitting Scientology.org with Gigaloader,
another poster described “Phase 2”: /b/ would create a shell site and upload to it a video that repeatedly flashed “facts of Scientology and its