An international hacking group is rumored to have attacked “Ilgan Best,” one of South Korea’s biggest online communities.

Ilgan Best (Ilbe.com) is a humor-centered community website, producing jokes and political viewpoints.

According to reports by local media, Ilgan Best came under a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack early Monday, which limited access to the site.

Soon after the attack, pundits began to speculate that Ilgan Best had been attacked by Anonymous, an international hacker group. Anonymous Korea had said via its Twitter account that several members of Ilgan Best caused trouble on Sunday.

“Several members of Ilbe.com came to our OpIsrael IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and caused a ruckus,” it said. The group added that the operators of the IRC were furious and threatened to attack South Korea if Ilgan Best members did not stop. OpIsrael IRC refers to the hacker group’s recent cyber attacks on Israel.

Anonymous Korea posted a comment hours after the attack, saying that “there is a possibility the furious operators raided Ilgan Best,” but neither confirmed nor denied the allegation.

The website came under fire after it posted allegedly offensive jokes regarding liberal political figures, such as belittling former president Roh Moo-hyun’s death.

The website suffered a major setback last year when one of its users posted a photo of himself pretending to rape a cardboard cutout of an underage female singer.



By Yoon Min-sik
(minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com)