Anonymous Attacks North Korea, Denies Targeting South

Groups claiming to represent Anonymous launch separate DDoS attacks and defacements against both North and South Korean websites.

Anonymous: 10 Things We Have Learned In 2013 (click image for larger view and for slideshow)
Government websites in both North Korea and South Korea have been targeted by attackers claiming to be operating under the banner of the Anonymous hacktivist collective. But are elements of the group behind both sets of attacks?
The online attacks against South Korean websites began Tuesday morning, local time, on the anniversary of the start of the
Korean War
(1950-53). Targeted sites included the countrys presidential office (known as Cheong Wa Dae or the Blue House), other government agencies as well as media groups,
reported South Korean news agency Yonhap
.
It is verified that not only Cheong Wa Dae and the Prime Ministers office but also some media outlets were hacked, an official at the National Police Agencys cyber terror response team told Yonhap. It seems that a massive cyber attack has started.
One of the hacked sites contained the following defacement: Great leader Kim Jong-un, referring to the leader of the North Korean regime, which is based in Pyongyang. For a 10-minute period, another defacement included a picture of South Korean president Park Geun-hye with the following message: We Are Anonymous. We Are Legion. We Do Not Forgive. We Do Not Forget. Expect Us.
[ This isnt the first time North Korean websites have been targeted. Read
Anonymous Takes Down North Korean Websites
. ]
South Korean government officials said none of the attacks had hacked into the countrys military networks, and that they had yet to identify the attackers. But official Anonymous channels have denied having any involvement in the attacks.
We didnt Hack any #SouthKorea websites,
announced the Japanese branch of Anonymous Tuesday in a tweet.
The obvious culprit in the attacks would be North Korea. A
wiper malware attack
against multiple South Korean banks and broadcasters in March 2013 that erased 48,000 hard drives, for example, was
traced to a Pyongyang-based attacker
. Previous online attacks against South Korean sites, in 2009 and 2011, were also traced to Pyongyang.
If North Korea did launch the most recent attacks, it may have been a preemptive move before planned Anonymous attacks, which began as scheduled Tuesday. The attacks were announced last week as part of the
ongoing Anonymous #OpNorthKorea campaign
. A
list of targets published via Pastebin
included multiple North Korean government websites, the official North Korean News Agency, airline Air Koryo and numerous businesses.
Anonymous recommended that attackers employ such
distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack tools
as Slow Loris for Python and Windows, the
Low-Orbit Ion Canon
, and what the group dubbed the
OWASP Layer 7 DDOS Tool.
As part of Tuesdays attacks, independent penetration tester JokerCracker, along with AnonymousTjTeam (aka
Anonymous Tijuana
), claimed via Twitter to have
defaced more than 270 North Korean government website pages
.
In a statement addressed to the tyrants of the North Korean government, Anonymous repeated its demand for Kim Jong-un to step down. The only power you have are missiles and nuclear, it said. We are more powerful than that. You cannot destroy ideas with missiles.
According to an
attack FAQ published in April
, as part of #OpNorthKorea, Anonymous has claimed to be working with small cells in North Korea to create a ninja gateway that would bridge the countrys quite small Internet -- known as Kwangmyong -- with the Internet at large.
Meanwhile, earlier this month Anonymous claimed to have
completed the ninja gateway
and to have infiltrated multiple North Korean sites. We completed [several] attacks on your internal websites and inside your local intranets, read a statement released by Anonymous. None of those claims have been verified, but the group promised to release related documents Tuesday.

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Anonymous Attacks North Korea, Denies Targeting South