Wrong Account To Close: Twitter Briefly Suspends Anonymous' Account

Twitter briefly suspended the main mouthpiece belonging to the hacker collective Anonymous after the group posted personal data belonging to members of Westboro Baptist Church, the hacker group said Wednesday.

But more than an hour after its main Twitter account -- @YourAnonNews -- was shut down, Anonymous announced the account had been re-activated in a series of tweets.

The brief ordeal began shortly before noon, when the group tweeted from a different account it had set up, ‏@YANBackUp.

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment.

In recent days, Anonymous had targeted Westboro Baptist Church after the controversial semi-religious group announced plans to protest a Sunday night vigil in remembrance of the victims of Friday's school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

On Sunday, Anonymous posted a list of data on the file-sharing site Pastebin that it claimed belonged to Westboro members. The data including names, street addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, according to CNET. One Westboro member's Twitter account was reportedly taken over by hacker @cosmothegod, who changed the woman's Twitter background and tweeted out a petition calling for the White House to recognize Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group.

On Wednesday, the group posted a screenshot -- which it claimed was from Twitter --explaining that the account was suspended because it violated the Twitter's rules prohibiting users from posting individual's private information.