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Anonymous hacks North Korea's Twitter and Flickr accounts

The "hacktivist" group also takes credit for accessing a North Korean news and information site, which is currently offline.

Lance Whitney Contributing Writer
Lance Whitney is a freelance technology writer and trainer and a former IT professional. He's written for Time, CNET, PCMag, and several other publications. He's the author of two tech books--one on Windows and another on LinkedIn.
Lance Whitney
2 min read
North Korea's Flickr account as hacked by Anonymous.
North Korea's Flickr account as hacked by Anonymous. Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET

Anonymous continues to target North Korea with its latest round of exploits.

Citing the threat posed by the North Korean government, the "hacktivist" group defaced the country's official Twitter and Flickr accounts yesterday.

The North Korean Twitter feed now displays a series of tweets with links that poke fun at the country's leader Kim Jong-un. One linked image portrays Kim Jong-un in a less than flattering light and criticizes him for "threatening world peace with ICBMs and nuclear weapons" and "wasting money while his people starve." The country's Flickr account shows the same image as well as a graphic displaying the words "We are Anonymous."

Anonymous also has reportedly hacked North Korean news and information Web site Uriminzokkiri.com. The site is currently unavailable, which could be due to distributed denial of service attacks from Anonymous, the group's favorite method of taking down a site.

In a posting on Pastebin yesterday, Anonymous took credit for stealing account information from Uriminzokkiri.com and explained how it was able to get inside Kwangmyong, North Korean's countrywide Intranet:

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.

This is the second most recent attack purportedly launched by Anonymous against North Korea. Last week, the group leaked account information from Uriminzokkiri.com and posted a few snippets on Pastebin. Anonymous claimed to have hacked more than 15,000 membership records from the site and threatened to wipe out all of that data.

The hacking attempts could continue as North Korea isn't likely to concede to the demands of Anonymous:

We demand:

- N.K. government to stop making nukes and nuke-threats

- Kim Jong-un to resign

- it's time to install a free direct democracy in North Korea

- uncensored internet access for all the citizens!

The North Korean government has ratcheted up international tensions lately by declaring a "state of war" against South Korea and threatening to launch nuclear weapons against the United States.

(Via The Next Web)