Global

Anonymous Can't Stop North Korea, but They Can Turn Kim Jong-un into a Pig

As they say, one small step for world peace, one giant leap for Photoshop.

By Alexander Abad-Santos
Saved Stories
This article is from the archive of our partner .

While the U.S. and North Korea continue playing a game of chicken, it looks like Anonymous has made good on their threat of hacking North Korea and hijacked social media pages belonging to Uriminzokkiri, one of North Korea's official propaganda outlets. "Operation Free Korea" is here, and, yes, it begins by transforming Kim Jong-un into a pig. The do-gooder hacker collective had warned on Tuesday that it gained access to Uriminzokkiri, which is probably most famous for giving us that disturbing video in February with a North Korean boy envisioning an American city getting wiped out to the tune of "We Are the World." The Anonymous threat was clear: "We got all over 15k membership records of Uriminzokkiri.com and many more," read the message, according to a version obtained by the tech site BGR. "First we gonna wipe your data, then we gonna wipe your badass dictatorship' government." And there's evidence on Uriminzokkiri's Twitter and Flickr accounts this morning that Anonymous's hacking has begun:

And then there's this image, along with a few Guy Fawkes masks that now appear on the North Korean propaganda outlet's Flickr account:

Obviously, those images are uncharacteristic — even blasphemous — for Uriminzokkiri, but it's unclear how much good this hack will actually do. Twitter and Flickr aren't exactly the backbone of a dictatorship that keep its people in the dark when it comes to the Internet and information in general. The majority of North Koreans do not have access to the web, Flickr, Twitter, or, you know, human rights. And hijacking a propaganda social media account, while amusing and perhaps symbolic, isn't exactly the same as cyber-attacking the country or getting access into North Korea's Intranet system — Anonymous promised they would do that too, though The Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey cites experts saying this would be very difficult, if not impossible because the DPRK's Intranet... isn't on the Internet.

But, as they say, one small step for world peace, one giant leap for Photoshop.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.