By Paul Wagenseil, TechNewsDaily
Score another one for the Jester.
On Friday, Dec. 14, the shadowy "patriot hacker" was instrumental
in taking down a Twitter account that mocked the victims of that morning's
Newtown, Conn., elementary
The account, at @z0bm13d, used a news photo of a bloodied, crying child as
its wallpaper, and a photo of a little boy wearing bloody zombie makeup as its
icon. Its displayed name was "Sandy Hook Victim."
ANALYSIS: I'm a Hacker, Not a Crook
"I now have more holes that my daddy can [have sex with]," the
account posted. "I forgive Ryan Lanza for what he did to me."
(Ryan Lanza of Hoboken, N.J., was erroneously named by several news outlets
Friday as the Newtown shooter. The killer was actually his younger brother,
Adam Lanza, who appeared to have been carrying identification naming him as
Ryan Lanza.)
It's not clear how quickly the alarm was raised, but on Friday evening a
Twitter account at @GonzoPhD posted,
"I never do this so listen to me this one time — report this sick piece of
.@z0mb13d for parodying today's shootings."
The Jester, whose Twitter account is @th3j35t3r, and whose activities are
mostly limited to attacking Islamic extremist websites, noticed and tried to
alert Twitter management directly.
"@twitter @support @safety 'FIX' THIS >> @z0mb13d," he tweeted.
"Retrieve any IP details logged, pass to LEA's, I'd be happy to give perp
some 'bad news'."
But it seemed the Jester, who has managed to keep his own identity secret,
wasn't willing to wait for Twitter to take action.
"Only hope is a very clever SE [social
engineering] attack," he tweeted. "@z0mb13d I have a very
particular set of skills acquired over a long career. Skills that make me a
nightmare for people like u."
(Twitter refused to comment for this story. The Jester did not respond to a
request for comment.)
First, the Jester said, he looked at @z0mb13d's followers and quickly
correlated them to a similarly named group in the Steam online-gaming
community.
"Guy behind this despicable account >@z0mb13d is part of 'zomb13'
gaming crew on steam, look at his followers, then look at steam," the
Jester wrote. "How long b4 one of ur 'buddies' rats u out as pressure
mounts?"
Within a couple of hours, the Jester dug up and posted a partial telephone
number belonging to a friend of the @z0mb13d account owner.
Around the same time one of @z0mb13d's first followers, whose account bore
the same handle as a member of the gaming crew, closed his Twitter account.
An hour later, the Jester had linked the offensive account to an Indiana
college student who worked at Dairy Queen and liked the horror-rap group Insane
Clown Posse — and @z0mb13d had been suspended by Twitter.
Just as soon as that small victory was achieved, however, another threat to
online decency presented itself.
The Westboro
Baptist Church, famed for picketing military funerals with "God Hates
Fags" signs, promised via
Twitter to do the same at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Soon afterwards, the Jester posted another tweet: "#WBC #Westboro
baptist church site .godhatesfags.com — seems to be experiencing 'technical
difficulties'."
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