Anonymous messes with North Korea

Now, for another installment of This Week in North Korea.  This time around, it’s not the U.S. or South Korea that prove to be the rogue state’s biggest enemy. Instead, it’s a little group that you may have heard of called Anonymous.  This collective of hackers (or at least a portion of them) decided to take matters on the KoreanPeninsula into their own hands and hack into the DPRK’s equivalent of Flickr and Twitter.

The Twitter feed they used primarily to send out messages, referring people to other sites that they were hacking.  On Flickr, however, they took a little more direct action.  Once in, they began to post pictures.  Some of these were mock-ups of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, including one of him depicted as a half-man, half-pig.  Others were more general political images and statements.  And, naturally, they posted up their Anonymous calling card to let the country know that they were the ones responsible.  They also left a few nasty messages informing the DPRK that they’d be messing with their computers pretty seriously.

All this went down early on the morning of Thursday, April 4 and the hackers managed to hold onto the sites for quite a long time.  Not surprising, considering that North Korea has no top-rated computer programming school that I’ve ever heard of.  After the group was done, North Korea began to repair the damage and put things back in order.

While it’s definitely amusing, is this a good move or otherwise?  It will certainly affect relations with the West, but to what extent?  Will North Korea try to use this as yet one more example of Western imperialism, turning it into a bargaining chip or, more likely, propaganda to use in controlling their own people?

The Internet isn't exactly a big thing in the DPRK.  Most people barely have access to food, let alone computers.  But still, it could and most probably will tick off the important people, and they’re the ones that hold the power in the country.

Anonymous Logo courtesy of Kephir via Wikicommons