The activist computer hacker group Anonymous broke into ISIS Twitter accounts and filled them with rainbows and other symbols of gay pride following the mass shooting in Orlando.
A Twitter user, WauchulaGhost, claimed to have hacked more than 250 Twitter accounts related to the radical Islamic State of Israel and Syria during the past month,
CNN Money reported.
"There was a few of us... that discovered a vulnerability," he told CNN. "We thought, 'Hey let's go start taking their accounts ... and humiliating them.'"
In the wake of Sunday's massacre at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, the hackers shifted their ammunition from pornography to gay pride.
"You had all those innocent lives lost," WauchulaGhost told CNN. "I just felt there's something I could do against the Islamic State to defend those people."
The hacker identified himself with the group Anonymous and said there are hundreds of like-minded hackers searching out ISIS-related Twitter accounts.
On June 10, the group claimed to have hacked 1,500 such accounts,
CBS San Francisco reported.
Omar Mateen, the suspect in the Orlando shooting, reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS in a phone call to police prior to the attack.
Many of the hacked accounts had posted support for Mateen, and WauchulaGhost replaced their posts with gay pride images and messages and renamed the accounts “Jacked by a Ghost,” the
New York Daily News reported.
Twitter has suspended most of the accounts hacked by Anonymous. A spokeswoman told CNN that the company, which prohibits the use of its platform to promote terrorism or violence, has suspended 150,000 ISIS-related accounts since the middle of last year.
Twitter users cheered the hack.
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