Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on Friday that a North Korean human rights event, set to take place for the first time in the former East Germany, was canceled due to a website outage.
The event, titled Defectors: Insights into Dictatorship, was scheduled for the 17th and aimed to shed light on recent developments and human rights issues in North Korea. However, it has been abruptly called off.
The Central Political Education Institute of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the German Academy of Schwerin organized the event, which faced unprecedented disruption. The organizers believe the website outage was a hacking attack that North Korea potentially orchestrated.
The organizers explained that the German Academy of Schwerin’s website had been compromised since the 10th, just a week before the event. Attempts to access the site triggered a warning: Your password, messages, or credit card information may be at risk of theft, and those who tried to access the site were redirected to an unrelated construction company’s webpage.
The South Korean Embassy in Germany emailed RFA on Thursday to inform that the event was deemed unfeasible under these circumstances. With the website down, organizers could not promote the event or process participant registrations.
Kim Sang Guk, an adjunct professor at the University of Ludwigshafen, pointed out that North Korea has recently targeted defense companies with similar hacking attempts. He suggested that the regime might have been uncomfortable with the discussions on sensitive human rights issues and could have orchestrated the attack to disrupt the event.