A teenager hacked North Korea's version of Facebook using this stupidly simple password
Kim won't be happy
How would you go about hacking the internet services of one of the most secretive, ruthless dictatorships in the world?
In the case of one British teenager who claims to have broken into the accounts of North Korea's version of Facebook - just use the default passwords.
The anonymous teen told Mirror Online that he was interested to check out the new North Korean StarCon service during his computer studies at college.
"I was curious and decided to visit it. The site was created using off-the-shelf software, so naturally I went to the vendor's website looking at what features it had."
It was there that he came across the default username and password provided with the software: the painfully obvious combination of 'Admin' and 'password'. To his gob-opening horror, when he tried these on the StarCon site, it worked.
"Once I logged in I was able to see the site's statistics, basic user information, site settings and change the site’s adverts... I was surprised it even worked, surely this should have been changed before going live?"
StarCon appears to have been built using a piece of software that clones many of the features of Facebook: users can create a profile, link to other friends and browse a news feed. Hosted in computer servers based in North Korea, web analyst Doug Madory told Vice that it's likely that the new network isn't finished, and could have launched with unchanged passwords as part of a trial period.
To add to the fledgling service's headache, it's since been the target of a more malicious hack, resulting in it going offline.
In summary: if you're going to test out your nation's new social network, make sure you change all the passwords first. But you probably knew that, didn't you?
[Via: Mirror Online]
