Someone may have hacked the North Korean UN mission’s voicemail

For the past 29 years, one of the few ways to get in touch with the North Korean government has been a phone number printed in the United Nations member directory.

It's the line to North Korea's permanent mission to the UN — their only diplomatic outpost on American soil — an office on the 13th floor of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper.

However, sometime within the past three years, an unknown person apparently hacked the mission's voicemail, rerecording the greeting message as a satirical monologue about mass starvation and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

CNN discovered the voicemail in late September while attempting to contact the mission. Until Wednesday, callers who dialed its number and stayed on for the voicemail greeting would hear a high-pitched voice speaking in a racist caricature of an East Asian accent. The speaker jokes about North Korea's chronic food shortages and encourages anyone wishing to contact Kim Jong Un to leave a message, saying that if they do, perhaps "someone (will) get fed sometime soon."

Then an automated voice chimes in, informing the caller that the mailbox is full.

Isolated North Korea has in the past faced huge food shortages driven by economic mismanagement and exacerbated by official clampdowns on border trade, as well as the diversion of scarce resources to military projects, according to experts.

The North Korean mission did not answer an email inquiring about its voicemail greeting being changed.

When a CNN producer went to their office in New York and knocked on the door to ask in person, a male staffer emerged. The staffer refused to answer questions but listened, with a surprised expression, as the producer called the mission's number and played the voicemail greeting in its entirety.

A view of the entryway to the North Korean mission to the UN in New York. - Yong Xiong/CNN

"This is not our number," the staffer said and slammed the door shut.

Days later, after North Korea's vice foreign minister addressed the UN General Assembly, the mission published the phone number in question on the first page of the minister's speech.

After this story was published, the prank voicemail disappeared. Callers who dial the mission now hear only the beep of an answering machine and are able to leave a message.

A spokesperson for the UN Media and Liaison Unit (MALU) told CNN that the number connected to the voicemail was the only one they had, and that they were unaware of any change to the mission's previous voicemail greeting. The UN's Protocol and Liaison Service, which publishes the directory, referred CNN back to MALU.

It's unclear who pulled the prank, though there are a few public hints as to when it may have changed and how. David Maxwell, vice president at the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy, told CNN that he called the mission while attending a protest outside in November 2023. Maxwell recalled that the voicemail greeting at the time was just a recording informing the caller that the number did not take messages.

Experts told CNN that finding out who changed the voicemail is impossible without access to the private call logs for the North Korean mission, but a stranger may have been able to re-record the mission's greeting message without much effort.

Barcelona-based cybersecurity researcher Martin Vigo told CNN that many users often fail to change their voicemail passwords from the default code issued by the carrier, which in some cases may be the last four digits of their phone number.

Guessing passcodes is also rather easy, especially with automated calling services that can rapidly guess and input thousands of combinations for four-digit PINs.

"For 40 bucks, I can 100% access your voicemail if you have a four-digit pin," said Vigo. "It's very cheap, and very fast."

The mission's phone line once served as a key circuit for diplomacy. North Korea and the US have no formal ties, so the country's UN mission long acted as "the New York channel": one of the only points of contact between the US government and Pyongyang.

Joel S. Wit, a former State Department official and author of a book on US attempts to disarm North Korea, said that the mission was an important part of negotiations over North Korea's nuclear program in 1994.

Seated under portraits of former North Korean Leaders Kim Il Sung, left, and Kim Jong Il, North Korea's Foreign Minister Ri Su Yong answers questions during an interview at the country's Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York on April 23, 2016. - Julie Jacobson/AP

The mission has a permanent staff of 23 diplomats and aides, according to the UN's directory. Wit remembers the mission's office space as sparsely furnished with "the required picture of their leaders" hanging on the wall. All the mission staff live nearby, as the State Department requires North Korea's diplomats to obtain permission before traveling more than 25 miles from New York City.

"Back in the Clinton years, we were actually doing negotiations with the North Korean mission," said Wit. "This was a very serious relationship."

But times have changed. Wit said that as succeeding attempts to defuse North Korea's nuclear program have failed — including landmark talks in 2019 between Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump – Pyongyang and the US have lost what few diplomatic ties they had. Instead, North Korea has cultivated relations closer to home, especially with Russia, which has gladly accepted thousands of North Korean soldiers for the front lines of its war in Ukraine.

"Ukraine is a prime example of the shift in relations," Wit said. "The North Koreans think geopolitically. They're not ideological robots. Their geopolitics drives their foreign policy."

"I'm sure that the New York channel today is pretty much non-functioning," Wit continued. "Whoever hacked (the voicemail) probably didn't know, but it's a function of the relationship between the United States and North Korea. Today, the relationship doesn't matter to the North Koreans."

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