Websites
Hackers attack North, South Korean websites
Jun 25th
The previously announced June 25 attack on North Korean websites by hackers working under the “Anonymous” name took an unexpected turn on Tuesday when several South Korean sites were hit with attacks. The actions coincided with the release of what hackers said were stolen files on American military personnel.
The North Korean attack did start as scheduled and appears to have been initially successful. Most major North Korean websites are either inaccessible or difficult to access, indicating they are being hit by a denial of service attack. This involves overwhelming a web server with requests so it gets tied up and More >
Anonymous counts down to planned DPRK cyber attack
Jun 24th
Members of the international hacking collective Anonymous look set to launch a planned cyber attack on North Korean Internet properties at midnight local Korean time on Monday night.
The group has also promised to make public some details of documents gained from a claimed attack on North Korean internal servers.
In messages posted to Twitter on Monday, Anonymous members indicated the countdown for the next stage in their “OpNorthKorea” series of attacks is unchanged.
A Twitter message posted by an Anonymous member posted at around 1pm Korea time on Monday.
The exact nature of the attacks is not known, but Anonymous typically uses denial of More >
WRN ends Voice of Korea relays
Jun 22nd
London-based World Radio Network appears to have ended its relays of the Voice of Korea, North Korea’s international shortwave radio service.
The broadcasts appeared in May and were being recorded by WRN from Voice of Korea’s daily English-language shortwave broadcasts. Voice of Korea puts out a daily hour-long program in English each day and it’s relayed several times to listeners around the globe.
The shortwave signal meant sometimes poor audio quality, but the WRN website was the only place on the Internet offering the program on-demand. Voice of Korea’s own website has news and music clips but not the entire broadcast.
At the time, WRN More >
KCTV Facebook page deleted, but streams live on
Jun 14th
A Facebook page that claimed to be the official home of North’s Korea’s main national TV channel, Korean Central Television, has disappeared.
The page appeared to have been around for at least a month and content included links to KCTV news bulletins on the YouTube channel of the China-based Uriminzokkiri website, photos and stories from the government’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and some “behind the scenes” pictures from the TV station.
It was written as if it was being run from within the TV station in Pyongyang — something that appears to have fooled several major international news agencies — but More >
Live from Pyongyang, it’s KCTV on Facebook … or maybe not
Jun 10th
On Thursday, South Korea’s Yonhap reported on a new Facebook page in the name of the Korean Central Television, North Korea’s national TV station. (Updated. See below.)
Yonhap said, “North Korea’s state broadcaster started real-time Facebook broadcasting as the communist country moves to expand its propaganda efforts into the social networking realm, official sources said Thursday.”
In never divulged who the “official sources” were beyond describing them as people “who keep tabs on the North.”
Later in the day, Agence France Presse reported the same Facebook page, reporting on the news of Kim Jong Un’s visit to a mushroom farm in the first news bulletin of More >
Voice of Korea’s shortwave broadcasts now on-demand
May 28th
The daily English-language broadcast from North Korea’s international radio station, Voice of Korea, is now available on the Internet.
The programme is being carried by World Radio Network, a London-based organization that rebroadcasts material from international radio stations on its own satellite channels and via FM relays in several countries.
Most of the WRN programming is received in studio quality via satellite or Internet, but the Voice of Korea programs are a recording from the shortwave broadcasts.
That means they come with all the atmospheric interference and fading that is typical of shortwave.
For the daily news, the audio clips on the Voice of More >
Google on North Korean maps
May 18th
The recent addition of North Korea to Google’s Maps service made up a small part of the company’s presentation to developers at its annual conference on Wednesday.
Brian McClendon, vice president of Google Maps, spoke about adding data and what it meant during at keynote speech at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco.
North Korea had been a largely white area of Google Maps until it started publishing user-supplied data. Now a little information on Pyongyang and some of the major towns is included in the service, although it’s still far from complete.
Curtis Melvin’s North Korea Uncovered, even in the latest More >
Hacker publishes North Korean website hit list
May 7th
An unidentified Internet user posting under the name of the Anonymous hacking collective has published a “hit list” of North Korean websites.
The list is said to be related to a coordinated attack that hackers appear to be planning for June 25. The action is part of “OpNorthKorea,” which previously took sites in North Korea and China offline in a series of distributed denial of service attacks.
The message appears to have been translated from another language, probably Korean, into English and includes sites based in China, Japan, the U.S., Spain and a single website in Pyongyang.
The source of the list is unclear More >
Thousands more DPRK-related website account details published
Apr 21st
The personal details of thousands of users of three North Korean-related websites have been published by hackers.
The details include names, email addresses, user names and in some cases addresses and phone numbers of people to the three sites: the Japan-based Choson Sinbo (조선신보, 朝鮮新報) newspaper, the China-based Ryomyong (려명) site and the U.S.-based Korea American National Coordinating Council (재미동포전국연합회).
The details were apparently stolen by hackers working under the banner of the Anonymous group, who have been attacking North Korean-related websites for the last few weeks.
The largest database dump was that of the Choson Sinbo, which contained 3,667 records. The Ryomyong database numbered just over 1,300 users More >
Uriminzokkiri restoring after hack
Apr 7th
This week’s hack of the Uriminzokkiri website certainly raised the bar in the cyber battle currently playing out online.
It marked the first time in the current round of attacks that anyone had managed to break in and deface a North Korean website. Over the last couple of weeks, several sites have been taken offline by denial of service attacks, but such attacks simply impede the website’s ability to serve pages and don’t affect the content.
This time around the attack saw the site removed and its Twitter and Flickr channels accessed. The Flickr channel is back under a new account, it appears More >
