A new (media) war involving the controversial Church of Scientology has just started! This time it is a group of hackers, which calls itself “Anonymous” or “Anon”, that hit the popular Church’s web site, in a move that reportedly tries to open people’s eyes on the real truth about the Church of Scientology.

The group’s attack started on January 19, according to Anonymous’ web site itself. The angry hackers claimed that they had knocked the Church of Scientology’s web site offline through a distributed denial-of-service attack. This practice involves many computers that start bombarding the victim’s server with requests, overwhelming it with lots of data in the hope of eventually knocking the system offline.

According to the group’s video manifesto posted on YouTube, the attack was spurred by the Church of Scientology effort to remove a video of Tom Cruise professing his admiration for this strange, controversial religion of our century. The popular actor is known to be a fervent Scientologist and this caused him several other disputes over time. For example, in summer Germany did not allow Tom Cruise to film his movie (Valkyrie) in this country just because he is a promoter of Scientology.

"For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind and for our own enjoyment, we shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form," Anonymous’ computerized voice stated in the video posted on YouTube. The group also accused the media for failing to completely report their criticism of the church, as on Friday, YouTube took down one of the group’s videos citing a “terms of use violation.”

Anonymous generated a powerful attack against Scientology.org, which was hit with several DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks over the past few days. According to Jose Nazario, a senior security engineer with Arbor Networks, a company compiling data on Internet attacks, it seems that Anonymous’ attacks flooded the Church of Scientology’s web site with as much as 220 Mbps of traffic, which indicates that the group itself is based on some sort of organization.

However, shortly after these attacks, the Church seems to have moved its web site to a server hosted by Prolexic Technologies, a company specialized in protecting other companies from DDOS attacks.

The Church of Scientology represents a secretive and highly controversial religion of our century that attracts at the same time lots of critics and admirers.