711chan.org administrator calls for an end to attacks on Scientology

January 28, 2008

Administrators for 711chan.org, one of the websites responsible for starting Project Chanology, a "raid" or attack against the Church of Scientology and their website, slowed down their "attack".

In an exclusive interview with Wikinews, an administrator of 711chan states that they will "probably stay away from the CoS [Church of Scientology]."

"We're probably just going to stay away from the CoS raid. It was poorly managed. We could've brought down a lot more if we weren't just a bunch of unorganized brats," said 'Plasma', an administrator on 711chan.org.

"Many people from 711chan still want to raid, but the administration is sick of it," added Plasma who also stated that "Partyvan IRC actually has decided to remove the raid."

Much of the reason stems from the fact that the attack on the Church was meant to stay within 711chan and that users were to stay "anonymous." An e-mail was leaked on the internet when the attack began exposing the script used to attack the Church's website.

"This is not what the raid originally started as. Partyvan declares this as a threat to the network, and Anonymous alike. We have been under constant botnet attacks, 711chan hacked, and tons of drama over this. You guys did a very poor job of staying Anonymous. It's obvious that a lot of you broke rules 1, and 2," said a statement on 711chan's website.

The rules they refer to, according to Plasma, mean the "Rules of the Internet" and are: "#Do not talk about /b/ (Only applies to raids.)
 * 1) Do NOT talk about /b/ (eBaums did it.)"

Both key rules were broken by users, according to Plasma.

The attack on Scientology was launched on Wednesday January 16 by a group labelled "Anonymous", on the website "Insurgency Wiki", a spinoff of 4chan which is also affiliated with 711chan. The "History" section of the site explains, in a satirical fashion, that the incident was prompted by the Church of Scientology's attempts to remove a promotional video featuring Scientologist Tom Cruise from YouTube. Though YouTube complied with the Church of Scientology's requests to take down the video, other sites such as Gawker.com stated that they will keep hosting the video.

One poster admitted to being a part of the effort, writing in a blog post "I have myself, as per instructions, loaded up Gigaloader and started bombarding the Scientology homepage. Theres [sic] something in the hilarious anarchy of the net that produces these 'events' every now and again." The poster wrote that "Prompted I think by the Tom Cruise video, a new obsession is taking hold on the internet. An insurgency against The Church of Scientology."

Not long after their attack, a previously unknown group called The Regime used keylogging to gain an administrator password to 711chan.org.

"I was actually away from home when I noticed my personal dedi was compromised (my bash_history file had lots of strange entries), so I informed Partyvan IRC staff (the CoS raid room as well as 711chan's IRC room are there) and minutes later, 711chan's machine was also compromised. I arrived home around an hour later, and immediately restored the contents of the 711 machine back to a previous state. I also got the passwords reset on my dedi and that was back in order. I went to bed shortly after that," said Plasma in regards to The Regime's attack on 711chan.

"The next morning I wake up to hundreds of MSN windows and emails telling me both servers have been compromised again, and our backups for 711 have been removed. The software we use to run 711chan's machine got bugged up somehow and make it difficult for me to fix things, which is why the site didn't respond at all for most of the day. At the time of writing this I still haven't got the backups reloaded onto the machine," added Plasma.

Plasma states that 711chan.org will be off line at least until the end of January, possibly longer, but the site is not expected to change.

"I shut down our server to prevent any more damage. Right now, our plan is to lay low and get stuff started up on a more secure machine. We'll be back up by the end of the month, hopefully. 711chan will probably be staying the same it is, however," said Plasma.

But they didn't go down without a fight adds Plasma.

"As who the "Regime" is? I took a look at one of the things they planted on my machine, which lead me to #!!regime on GameSurge IRC. `immortal' and about 30 drones were in that channel. Members of the g00ns community (allies of 711, also linked to Partyvan IRC) found out they had dox (documents such as phone numbers, addresses, SSN numbers, names, that sort of thing) on `immortal' and his wife. I actually have these details and attempted to call him, but it went unanswered," said Plasma.

The information that 711chan.org obtained was later posted on the website operated by The Regime. Wikinews has attempted to contact The Regime a second time regarding the incident, and they have only replied with "your articles are bullshit."