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 service attacks. These involve flooding web servers with requests for pages — so many requests that the servers become overloaded and are difficult or impossible to load for bonafide users.
Denial of service attacks are different from hacks in that they don’t involve breaking into the web server and making any changes to the site.
A Twitter message posted by an Anonymous member posted just after noon Korea time on Monday.
The June 25 date, which marks the anniversary of the start of the Korean War, first came up in April when Anonymous last launched a round of attacks on North Korea. The action resulted in several major North Korean websites being offline for days.
Most were hit with denial of service attacks but at least one high-profile target was hacked. Uriminzokkiri, a China-based website that carries a large amount of North Korean media and propaganda, was broken into and details on its 15,000 users were posted on the Internet.
Among the Internet postings ahead of the attacks was an image of a mourner in front of the sarcophagus of Kim Jong Il. The image had been altered to give the mourner a Guy Fawkes mask, which is one of the most recognized symbols used by Anonymous members.
Ahead of the planned attack, North Korean state media launched a stinging attack on Anonymous.
The full text is currently difficult to access on the KCNA website, either because it’s already being attacked or because of controls put on connections by North Korea. Here’s the full text of the KCNA commentary:
Pyongyang, June 21 (KCNA) — The international hacking group Anonymous is letting loose a string of rubbish regarding the DPRK as the goal of cyber attack.
It announced that it would conduct hacking attack called “operation for infiltrating into interior of the north” with June 25 as an occasion and calculates this would help shake the social system in the DPRK.
Anonymous made up of riff-raffs dares hurt the social system of the DPRK, not content with doing bad things to demonstrate its technology.
This provokes side-splitting laughter.
It singled out the DPRK, a focus of world attention, as a target of cyber terrorism in a bid to have Anonymous, a target of world criticism, recognized by the world.
It hacked into open servers of the DPRK without any secret data by use of poor hacking programs.
And now it is busy describing it as a sort of big technological feat.
What merits a more serious attention is that the U.S. and South Korean puppet forces are joining Anonymous in cyber terrorism as they are keen to isolate and stifle the DPRK politically, militarily and economically and carry out ideological and cultural poisoning operations against the DPRK.
It is by no means fortuitous that South Korean conservative media including Chosun Ilbo and Choongang Ilbo are echoing the anti- DPRK misinformation floated by those betes noires doing everything dirty.
The above-said facts indicate that Anonymous is not a simple hacking group making cyber attack for fun but political servants and an international terrorist group of forces hostile to the DPRK wire-pulled by the U.S. and South Korean intelligence service behind the scene.
Anonymous, in fact, knows nothing about the DPRK.
The Network Kwangmyong Anonymous claimed hacked into it does not exist in the DPRK.
Nevertheless, it is misleading the world public opinion, creating impression that it discovered a sort of top secret on the basis of poor information provided by the U.S. and its puppet South Korean information organs by stealth.
Anonymous abuses IT, which should serve as a powerful means for developing human civilization, as a weapon for terrorism against a specified state.
This is a grave political provocation infringing upon the sovereignty and dignity of an independent country and an open challenge to the international community desirous of using everything created by modern science for independent development of countries and nations and welfare of humankind.
It is nothing but a charade for human scum of Anonymous to try to do harm to the social system in the DPRK as such group is not entitled to remain in the age of IT.
The world will clearly see what bitter cup of setback the Anonymous and other hostile forces behind it will have to drink.
I wonder if they used your North Korean website list to come up their targets =p – http://pastebin.com/BLSZ8cwY <= previously posted by this site. I did not read this before my previous comment but yes, as I figured they are using the same push button tools as before to start a DDoS attack. I am not supportive of the North Korean government and it's actions, but it's rather foolish if anyone involved with #OpNorthKorea thinks that what they are doing will somehow help improve conditions of the people living there or somehow topple the government.
No doubt the North Korean government has it's fair share of secrets and if/when documents which the members of this op supposedly have are released, if they are damaging enough then that might possibly cause a change. Again though, even the date chosen for this attack was in poor taste and further goes to show how any kind of social/political/etc liberation is not on the agenda of people involved.
I think they definitely used my list. The same sites are in there in the same order. Some of my headings are in there too. At least they took out the non-DPRK analytical sites listed at the bottom, otherwise we’d be under DDoS too!