(Updated April 4 @ 4:30 pm MDT)
The hacktivist group Anonymous has turned its attention to North Korea and its young leader, Kim Jong Un, hacking official Twitter and Flickr accounts in that country. The collective has, for the most part, focused on widely unpopular targets (eg, Westboro Baptist Church) and certainly few groups are in a position to gig the North Korean leader from within his own borders. Still, he’s unpredictable and perhaps should not be provoked unnecessarily.
Anonymous has urged North Koreans to rise up against their oppressive government and has circulated a less-than-flattering poster of Kim Jong Un. They also claim to have hacked news outlet Uriminzokkiri.com, allegedly stealing more than 15,000 passwords. The website is currently offline.
Anonymous explained how they did it:
We have a few guys on the ground who managed to bring the real internet into the country using a chain of long distance WiFi repeaters with proprietary frequencies, so they’re not jammed (yet). We also have access to some N.K. phone landlines which are connected to Kwangmyong through dial-ups. Last missing peace of puzzle was to interconnect the two networks, which those guys finally managed to do.
Today, in its latest threat against the US, the North Korean government reportedly has authorized its military to conduct a potential “smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear strike.”
Has Anonymous gone too far this time? One has to question the wisdom of taking shots at a pompous, posturing, erratic leader who keeps threatening to launch nuclear strikes at the US, its territories, and its allies.
(Then again, there’s the Washington Post blog that casts doubt on the whole incident — “Sorry, Anonymous probably didn’t hack North Korea’s intranet.”)
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- Anonymous hackers take control of North Korean propaganda sites (arstechnica.com)
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Anonymous found a “missing peace of puzzle”? How interesting.
And in answer to your question, if Anonymous did what he or she claimed then I agree that it sounds foolhardy to irritate someone as unstable as Kim Jong Un. Cool to be able to hack in, but to what end?
Anonymous is not a single individual; it is a loosely organized, unknown number of computer hackers from around the world. Clearly at least one of them was less interested in his (or her) English class than in his computer.
I didn’t realize that Anonymous was a group. The things that I learn. [Like the difference between peace and piece. ;-)]
I’m skeptical about this, if for no other reason that that there can’t be very many personal computers in that whole pitiful country, and most of those that do exist are probably under strict surveillance.
Admittedly not a lot of coverage by the major media outlets, and no way to confirm it actually happened.