Westboro Baptist Church Shirley Phelps’ Twitter hacked

The Westboro Baptist Church is a deplorable group at the best of times, but in the last couple of days it's received an extra helping of hate from the world at large after it announced its intention to protest the funerals of the the 20+ children that died during the dreadful shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school last week. Since then it's website has been hacked by Anonymous and 15 year old hacker Cosmo The God, has taken over Shirley Phelps' Twitter.

“This account is now being ran by @CosmoTheGod #UGNazi #oops,” read the first tweet published by Cosmo on the account. Since then he's gone on to retweet numerous mentions of his actions, as well as negative messages aimed at the Westboro Baptist Church and its supporters.

Along with the rest of his group, UGNazi, Cosmo was part of some of the biggest hacks in 2012, including those of the NASDAQ exchange website and CIA.gov. Cosmo's part in it was often related to social engineering, the practice of fooling staff at organisations to give out security information by appearing to be someone else over the phone or through other forms of communication.

At the time of writing he still has control over Shirley Phelps' account, with the latest tweet linking to a petition claiming that the Westboro Baptist Church should be labelled as a hate group. According to Wired, he's managed to do so by exploiting a flaw in Twitter's support ticket system, which makes it possible for an account holder to cancel a ticket before it is acted upon.

Shirley Phelp's is currently on a list of people that are banned from entering the UK for “fostering extremism or hatred”.

KitGuru Says: Nobody is going to condone hacking but there are certainly more just targets than others. Using the funerals of murdered school children to further your own cause, puts you at the top of that list.

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