Westboro Baptist Church GodHatesFags.Com Hacked Thursday; Site Remains Inaccessible

The Westboro Baptist Church web site remains inoperable, one day after it was hacked by someone called Jester, according to a report by the Register, which writes that the self-proclaimed activist revealed in a twitter update that he had broken into the Church's website in protests against its pickets on the funerals of American servicemen with anti-gay signs. The Jester gained notoriety with denial of service attacks against WikiLeaks around the time the site released US diplomatic cables late last year. It remains unclear whether Westboro Baptist Church itself or sections of Anonymous were the first to post threats against the church last weekend. The threats were later disavowed by members of Anonymous as a massive troll and a honeypot operation designed to capture IP addresses for subsequent lawsuits. The assaults on the church's GodHatesFags.com site have remained ongoing during the week and the site remained unreachable as of Friday. The Jester is known to have helped develop an application layer attack tool for assaulting jihadist sites, called XerXeS, a utility he has taken to applying to a range of targets, including WikiLeaks, and also, it is suspected, the controversial church, led by fire-and-brimstone minister Fred Phelps. The tool attacks sites at the application level and is therefore more sophisticated than the packet-flooding LOIC that's become the main artillery piece in assaults by Anons against those who have earned the loosely knit group's collective displeasure over recent months.