Westboro Baptist Church Web Security Provider To Donate Proceeds To Charity

Anonymous, in its continuing battle with “God Hates Fags” group Westboro Baptist Church, has managed to convince the security provider who was protecting the church from online attacks to donate proceeds to charity.

The hacktivist collective attacked the anti-gay organisation after it said it would picket the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, preaching its anti-gay message to the grieving families of 20 children and six adults killed there last Friday.

Whilst certain hacktivists were able to leak details of Westboro Baptist Church members, and hack their Twitter accounts, Anonymous came up against solid protection of the group’s websites in the form of Black Lotus, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection vendor.

Anonymous called on them to remove their protection, having organised a campaign against those providing services to Westboro Baptist Church.

Westboro Baptist Church vs. Anonymous

But as tension grew between the two sides, Black Lotus offered an olive branch, saying it would donate all the proceeds it receives from the Westboro Baptist Church to charity. The money will be going to various groups supporting the Newtown community.

“Our social commitments shall be long term, some now and some later,” Black Lotus said over its Twitter feed. It said it was asking opinions on who to donate to before talking more publicly about the issue.

“[We] will give very serious consideration in ensuring that our donations have a strong impact,” Jeffrey Lyon, information systems security professional at Black Lotus, told Wikinews. The United Way organisation looks likely to receive donations from Black Lotus soon.

Anonymous has had a turbulent month. Yesterday, one of its key Twitter accounts, @YourAnonNews, was suspended from Twitter, with some reporting it was due to the battle with Westboro Baptist Church.

The account has hundreds of thousands of followers and is used to relay news to members of the hacktivist collective. Twitter told TechWeekEurope it would not comment on specific accounts.

When the account came back online, a tweet claimed Twitter had suspended @YourAnonNews for sharing personal information. It appeared the personal information that was shared belonged to Shirley Phelps-Roper, a spokesperson of the Westboro Baptist Church, whose Twitter account was hacked earlier this week.

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