How do you handle a group of unidentified people who belong to a loosely-defined protest group that grew out of an online community best known for dark humor and shock tactics? It looks like the answer might be “grab them one at a time.”

CNN reports that Brian Thomas Mettenbrink may plead guilty to charges of committing cyber attacks against the Church of Scientology’s Web sites. CNN links Mettenbrink to the group Anonymous. Mettenbrink said he downloaded software that would allow him to commit a denial of service (DoS) attack against the church’s Web servers.

There are a few ways to commit a DoS attack, but the most common is to use a program to send millions of requests to a target Web server. The server gets bogged down trying to respond to all the requests and either slows to a crawl or crashes as a result.