4chan Close to Sending Justin Bieber to North Korea

Justin Bieber, the teen sensation that you’ve probably and unwillingly heard of in the past months, hasn’t had the best of weekends. Having stirred the destructive ‘fury’ of 4chan, just because of his huge popularity with a certain demographic, he was the victim of several attacks, pranks and rumors over the past days. As is usually the case with these types of mobilizations orchestrated by 4chan, the sheer number of participants and the different angles of attack made the entire campaign very successful.

One of the more serious attacks involved exploiting a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on YouTube to inject code into the comments section of the site. Videos targeted were mostly Bieber’s and viewers were bombarded with popup messages, claiming that the singer had been killed in a car accident, or were redirected to adult websites. The attack was dealt with by YouTube, initially by disabling comments altogether, and a fix was issued within a couple of hours.

But other attacks relied on more conventional means, sheer brute force. The Canadian singer had been running a vote on a website dedicated to his My World Tour, asking fans to choose the country where he would be touring next. Since there are no restrictions on the countries available, 4chan users voted en masse for North Korea.

The country quickly made it to the top of the list, up from the 24th position. The vote is set to close on July 7 and North Korea already has a slight lead. Internet access is practically non-existent in North Korea and it’s unlikely that the vast majority of the country’s citizens have even head of the pop star.

There are now over 485,000 votes to bring Bieber to North Korea with Israel following not that far behind with over 478,000 votes. Maybe, if the Israeli fans, which seem to be pretty heated about the whole thing, can pull it together, the pop star may dodge the bullet yet. Still, even if North Korea does come out on top and even if he and his management team would agree to go there, there are very few chances that the Pyongyang would approve of it.