NEWARK -- A 19-year-old Verona man today was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison for participating in a cyber attack against the Church of Scientology's websites almost two years ago.

Dmitriy Guzner, who pleaded guilty in May to one count of unauthorized impairment of a protected computer, appeared in U.S. District Court in Newark this morning before Judge Joseph A. Greenaway.

Video from Scientology raid in New York by the group Anonymous

Greenaway said he found the crime perplexing because Guzner is an intelligent young man, “but obviously he has lost his way.”

“This is not just the goofy endeavour of a teenager,” the judge said before handing down the sentence. “I don’t believe this is something that just came upon Mr. Guzner. … I don’t believe a young person gets involved in this act on a lark just because he’s surfing the Internet.”

Greenaway also sentenced Guzner to two years of probation following his prison sentence and ordered him to pay $37,500 in restitution to the church. The judge decided to honor the plea agreement, despite the church’s request for nearly $119,000 – the amount it cost the organization to hire an outside company to protect against the attacks.

Guzner, a Quinnipiac University student, denies being a member of Anonymous, the group that claimed responsibility for bringing down the church’s Web sites for 24 hours. He said he did not realize the seriousness of the planned attack at the time.

“They were saying, ‘Hey, let’s pull a prank,’” Guzner said, about the Internet chatter among the members of Anonymous.

Three weeks ago, a second man, Brian Thomas Mettenbrink, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on charges connected to the same cyber assault.

The online attack by members of a loosely formed, leaderless group called Anonymous was meant as an anti-Scientology protest. According to the Anonymous website whyweprotest.net, the group was upset by the church’s attempts to suppress a leaked promotional video featuring actor and Scientologist Tom Cruise, who made enthusiastic claims about the religion.

"I think they were relying on a very simple premise, that the number of people arrested and convicted of these kinds of attacks is very low," said Jose Nazario, manager of security research at Arbor Networks, which helps companies keep their websites secure.

On Jan. 17, 2008, Guzner and an undisclosed number of cohorts launched a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS for short, against the religious organization’s Web presence, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Erez Liebermann, who handled the Guzner case.

The main website was down for about 24 hours, until the church moved its servers to an outside hosting company. The church then hired another company to divert traffic coming from the attackers. Nazario measured 488 attacks by individuals on Jan. 19, the longest of which lasted almost two hours.

The cyber vigilantes kept up the attack for at least 12 days, according to a prosecutor involved in the case.

Others made prank calls to the "mother church" in Los Angeles and sent faxes of pure black paper to use up the toner in the fax machines, said Kendrick Moxon, a lawyer for the Church of Scientology.