The situation in the past few months has been quite volatile in the Korean peninsula with North Korea declaring “a state of war” against the South very recently. In this hack attack, a group of hackers or a hacker, appearing to be a part of the ‘hacktivist’ anonymous group, have declared that they have hacked 15,000 passwords of the users of Uriminzokkiri.com. This site is a popular North Korean news and information source and has a significant presence in twitter. It has been vulnerable to earlier hacking attacks too.
In an anonymous note, the hack attack hackers have declared six user details, out of the 15,000 that they claim to have obtained, as samples. Out of these six, three email addresses appear to be Korean and the other three appear to be of Chinese origin. These data shows that the hacked passwords were hashed, which provides more security than common alphabetical passwords. The note also demands the resignation of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and a full democratic rule in the country. Other significant demands of the group are for North Korea to stop nuclear arms race and provide unrestricted internet access to it’s citizens. The hacker or hackers claims to have control over the country’s important mail and web servers and have threatened to continue such attacks.
The suppression of internet in North Korea, the undemocratic governance and it’s aggressive moves towards South Korea and the US is the reason for the anonymous hackers to focus their attention on the country. The legitimacy of the claims by the hackers is yet to be verified but it was followed by some activity of the anonymous group against North Korea. The anonymous hackers claim that this is one of the five North Korean websites that were successfully attacked by them over the last weekend. It can be noted that sometime back, North Korea was accused of being involved in malware attacks over various banks and other important broadcasters of South Korea.
It is not clear if this attack was directly engineered by the central figures of anonymous group, but the next stage of Op Free Korea campaign, as this attack has been named, is supposed to be launched on 19th April. Till that time there can only be speculations about their claims and future motives.