North Korea has it’s own version of Facebook

And guess what? It was hacked within hours of going live! Good day all, this is the Angry Systems Administrator. Last week news came out that North Korea had created it’s own version of Facebook.

Why is a mystery to me since almost no one there has a computer, let alone access to things like electricity and food. Still, I’m guess that Buckethead, better known as Kim Jong-un wanted it so he could claim that he created it and coded the entire site, set up all the servers and wired the entire network by himself over a weekend.

Well, there was just one teensy little problem. The ultimate police state must have learned computer security procedures from Hillary Clinton’s personal IT administrator because the site was hacked within hours of going live. Here are the details from Motherboard:

You don’t need to be an ancient social media site to get hacked on the internet.

But it helps!

On Friday, we first reported on a mysterious Facebook clone hosted in North Korea. A mere few hours later, someone had already hacked the site.

[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbp_JQ7RxqM’]

I was posting links to the James Franco and Seth Rogen movie The Interview, which famously mocked North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un, on my newly-created account when I noticed something strange. On the bottom of the window, under the “Friends Suggestions” box, there was a “Sponsored” box containing a peculiar message.

And the message was?

“Uh, I didn’t create this site just found the login,” wrote an 18-year-old college student from Scotland named Andrew McKean.

McKean was able to become an admin for the site just by clicking on the “Admin” link at the bottom of the site and guessing the username and password.

And what was that username and password? I’m sure it must have been something very arcane and difficult to discover.

As it turned out, McKean said, the combination was extremely predictable: “admin” and “password.”

After reading Motherboard’s article on the site, McKean said he looked at a demo for the off-the-shelf Facebook clone called phpDolphin and noticed that the default credentials for an admin were “admin” and “password,” so he tried his luck on the North Korean site.

The FIRST thing any Systems Admin does once they load a system, even before putting it on a network, is change the default logins and passwords.

“I don’t know why, but i just wanted to check if it worked, after all this Facebook clone site was new and not much had been done to it,” he said, adding that he had “no plans” to do much more with it, other than perhaps redirect the site to an anti-North Korean site.

If you did that, you would have needed to reset the login credentials yourself to really stick it to Buckethead, Of course, the North Korean government is not known for their sense of humor and is known for killing anyone that annoys them, so not trashing the site was probably the right thing to do.

The fate of the site, just like its origin, is totally unclear at this point. Doug Madory, a researcher at Dyn and one of the first ones who spotted the site, expects it to be taken offline soon.

Well, according to Fox News, the site is now offline. I’m sure the North Korean Systems and Network admins who were handed the site by Comrade Buckethead after all his hard work are enjoying their new careers as dogfood.

Thank you

~The Angry Systems Administrator~

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