The extreme ideologies of the Westboro Baptist Church has attracted unwanted attention. And after planning to “protest” the funerals of dead children, the hackers at UGNazi got revenge.
A Twitter account belonging to Shirley Phelps-Roper, a “lawyer” and “official spokesperson” for the “church” (and daughter of its insane, bigoted founder, Fred Phelps) is now being run by UGNazi. Yesterday, she was writing things like this:
Now, not so much.
So far, the group has tweeted out a link to Shirley’s home phone number, a White House petition to recognise the WBC as a hate group and lots of gloating. The takeover comes right after a weekend of attacks against the WBC by Anonymous, making for a rousing one-two combo against the demented hecklers.
UGNazi claims that 15-year-old hacker-in-exile Cosmo the God is behind the seizure, but it’s unlikely he would risk going to prison over this. At least one would think so. At any rate, this is the way UGNazi goes from middling online pranksters to a serious force — they’ve got the people on their side right now. [Twitter]
Update: I just spoke with an alleged member of UGNazi, who says the group took control of Shirley’s account 4.5 hours ago:
We hacked their mail server se’d [social engineered] the host , reset [the Twitter] password through the mail server
When asked if more Twitter targets were being lined up to attack, we were told “If WBC doesn’t stop their shit yes we will.”
Update 2: Another member of UGNazi now claims the above individual is not actually part of UGNazi — or at least not authorised to make any statements on its behalf. Still, it’s likely that UGNazi broke into Shirley’s account using a method very close to that description.
GOD SENT THE SHOOTER to #SandyHook!@ Newton, CT instagr.am/p/TTyIgpEUij/
— WBC Photographers (@WBCPhotos) December 16, 2012
@dearshirley god sent Cosmo
— martin mchale (@MiMiCart) December 17, 2012