General

Anonymous hacks North Korean Flickr, Twitter accounts and state news website

Picture of Kim Jong-Un with a pig nose appears on official account

Social media accounts belonging to the North Korean government were hacked Thursday, as the nation says that it has cleared its military to use nuclear weapons.

The group Anonymous is taking responsibility for the hacks, that come amid mounting tension between North Korea and the rest of the world.

The last official image posted to North Korea’s Flickr account is from April 2 and is of leader Kim Jong-Un presumably voting on something, surrounded by rows of other stern-faced government and military leaders.

Then came an image of two tango dancers wearing the trademark white Anonymous masks, another image of an Anonymous mask and a poster of Kim with a pig nose and a Mickey Mouse tattoo.

Flickr.com

Anonymous finished its attack by posting an image of a black screen with the text “We Are Anonymous.”

On North Korea’s Twitter feed, Anonymous also took over and posted links to a number of sites that make fun of Kim.

The group is also taking credit for hacking North Korean state-controlled news site www.uriminzokkiri.com, which is currently down.

Anonymous also put out a press release about the attacks, in which it takes aim at Kim and also at the U.S. government, which it accuses of “creating the next kind of Cuba crisis.”

Anonymous also used the post to let on about how it hacked the secretive country’s intranet. It writes:

“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 [sic] of puzzle was to interconnect the two networks, which those guys finally managed to do.”

The hacks continued into Thursday morning, but it was unclear how long they would last. Anonymous wrote that their chain of connections was slow and that devices were being removed by North Korean authorities soon after they were detected.

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