14 DAY TRIAL // After defacing a Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) website, the Anonymous collective claims the controversial organization's security was better than that of HBGary Federal.
Last week, the WBC, an independent Baptist church known for its extreme views, especially regarding homosexuality, announced receiving threats from Anonnymous.
WBC's response came in the form of an open letter that tried to offend members of the hacktivist group and taunted them to "bring it on."
Despite this, Anonymous explained that it was not the source of the original leaflet that called for action against the WBC and noted that even its writing style is off.
The group said that probably the WBC produced it itself in order to attract media attention and piggyback on the Anonymous' current popularity.
A series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against WBC websites followed, but a pro-government hacktivist known as The Jester, who is now affiliated with Anonymous, took credit for them.
The Jester, who claims to having been part of a special U.S. military cyber division, took issue with the WBC because its members picket the funerals of U.S. soldiers.
Nevertheless, Anonymous did end up hacking one of WBC's websites eventually, during a live interview, in order to show that it can if it really wants to.
Following the hack, the group said on Twitter that "security wise, #WBC was more leet than #HBGary: It took #Anonymous a 0day to get in their network, not some public SQLi."
The statement refers to the recent hacking of HBGary Federal which resulted in tens of thousands of corporate emails being leaked onto the Internet, after the security firm threatened to expose Anonymous leaders.
The group previously claimed that the original entry point of that attack was an unsophisticated SQL injection vulnerability in the content management solution used by HBGary Federal.