One of North Korea's websites was breached, and 15,000 user records accessed, according to claims by Anonymous, the loosely organized collective of hacker activists.
"This is not about country vs country — This is about we, the people, the 99 percent (of USA and of North Korea) vs oppressing and violent regimes (like USA gov. and N.K. gov)!" the group said in a statement it posted about the attack.
Internet access to North Korea's 24 million people is extremely limited, mainly to government and military officials. A physical connection to the Internet comes through China, and is sometimes supplemented via a satellite provider, according to Renesys, a global Internet measurement firm.
The site that Anonymous claims to have breached, Uriminzokkiri.com, is actually based in China, according to Martyn Williams of North Korea Tech, which covers information technology in North Korea, and which first reported the attack.
He describes Uriminzokkiri.com as a "semi-official North Korean website" that "speaks for the North Korean government" and posts "much of the output of state media."
Anonymous has been sharing details of its efforts on Twitter, using the hashtag #OpNorthKorea.
As proof of its work, the group also posted user names, email addresses, birth dates and hashed passwords for six accounts from Uriminzokkiri.com. Despite that, there's "no evidence supplied that supported the assertion that Web and mail servers in North Korea or anything on the domestic intranet system had been accessed," Williams wrote.
Getting onto the domestic intranet is highly unlikely based on our current understanding of the network. It’s believed to be totally separate from the Internet with no network link between the two for security purposes. So a proven hack would be very interesting.
Over the last few years, Anonymous has claimed responsibility for many attacks on government and corporate sites in the U.S., as well as in other countries. In the U.S., Anonymous said it was behind a recent attack on an internal Federal Reserve website, which resulted in the group obtaining the personal information of more than 4,000 U.S. bank executives, which it published on the Web.
— Via The Next Web
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