Norks: Wasn’t us (#SonyHack)
If not North Korea, then who?
Yesterday the FBI announced that the North Koreans were behind the Sony hack.
Now the North Koreans are denying it, via BBC:
North Korea has offered to hold a joint inquiry with the United States into a cyber-attack on Sony Pictures, strongly denying US claims that it is behind it.
Its foreign ministry accused the US of “spreading groundless allegations”, which the joint probe would refute.
Without addressing Pyongyang’s idea, a US spokesman insisted that North Korea must admit “culpability” …
On Saturday, the North Korean foreign ministry said: “As the United States is spreading groundless allegations and slandering us, we propose a joint investigation with it into this incident.”
“Without resorting to such tortures as were used by the US CIA, we have means to prove that this incident has nothing to do with us.”
The statement said there would be “grave consequences” if the Americans rejected their inquiry proposal.
If not North Korea, then who? Here are four possibilities via NY Mag:
IT WAS A DISGRUNTLED SONY INSIDER, OUT FOR REVENGE
Marc W. Rogers, a “whitehat” hacker and security researcher at the online-traffic-optimizer CloudFlare, wrote on his personal blog that he’s betting on “a disgruntled (possibly ex) employee of Sony.” He notes that there were multiple ways hackers could have made money from stealing Sony’s information, and a nation-state could have used its access to Sony to gain more information about the film industry. Instead, Guardians of Peace chose to dump the information in a manner that’s extremely embarrassing to Sony.
* * *
IT WAS A GROUP OF HACKTIVISTS
In its excellent examination of the evidence in the Sony hack, Wired concludes that it’s more likely that the breach was the work of hacktivists such as Anonymous or LulzSec, rather than a nation-state. The FBI said it found “links to other malware that the FBI knows North Korean actors previously developed,” but hackers sophisticated enough to get into Sony’s systems would presumably also have the ability to plant false clues in their coding.
* * *
IT WAS THE CHINESE
The U.S. has already had multiple run-ins with hackers in the Chinese military, and last year it was reported that they were targeting various American companies. A U.S. official told Reuters on Friday that while North Korea was behind the operation, there was a link to China, either through collaboration with Chinese hackers or using Chinese servers to mask the hack’s origin. Statements from U.S. officials today did not mention China.
The cybersecurity firm Mandiant has been brought in to investigate the Sony hack, and according to Deadline, that could be another sign that the Chinese government was involved. “Mandiant has investigated so many Chinese attacks,” said a source. “It’s kind of their forte.”
* * *
EVERYBODY DID IT
There’s overlap in many of these theories, and it’s entirely possible that the answer is “all of the above.” Many have said Sony was lax about its cybersecurity, and as Wired notes, “we can’t rule out the possibility that nation-state attackers were also in Sony’s network or that a nation like North Korea was supportive of some of these hackers, since they shared similar anger over Sony.”
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Comments
What are they gonna do?
Hack again?
Clowns!
Hard to see how they could have done it without any help.
This is, of course, pure “gas-lighting”.
But whadya expect? They were going to step up and admit it?
Rather uppity, aren’t they?
This guy makes some sense.
http://marcrogers.org/2014/12/18/why-the-sony-hack-is-unlikely-to-be-the-work-of-north-korea/
On a side note, whether it was the NORKS or not, I said in a comment on this blog several years ago when Stuxnet hit Iran that the world got a whole lot more dangerous. I said I believed Stuxnet was the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb in terms of the “proliferation” effect. By that I mean there would be a global escalation in cyberwar weapons. Everybody in the world would be rushing to create ever more sophisticated cyberwar weapons to breech the ever most sophisticated cyberwar defenses of their enemies and visa versa.
My liberal friends were more upset that there was a movie mocking the norks as I’d have thought the norks would be at a movie premised on an assassination of their leader.
None of my liberal friends were the least bit upset at the “heckler’s veto” exercised by the hackers. Didn’t bother them one bit. The closest I came to getting an acknowledgement was when one of them stopped defending the hackers and just said, “the movie looked stupid anyway”.
In the video, that little fart Un looks as though he has gout.
O.J. Simpson will track down his wife’s killers before this ever happens.
I could see a scenario where the Chinese saw that the Norks were going to do this so they coordinated their own attack and used the Norks as cover.
I can also see where our government could screw this up and mistake the Chinese for the N. Koreans. Heck, if they can’t figure out how to collect public comments on net neutrality or how to keep Snowden under control, why should we expect them to get this right?
Firing up the high power crystal ball I see the perpetrator way in the background being one or more of the U.S. Governments alphabet soup groups. The purpose is to release some highly embarrassing but basically harmless information from a large multinational corporation close to a major holiday so it has a short but loud run in the MSM. The real purpose however, is to grease the skids in Congress for some serious muzzling of the internet. Remember what dear leader said on the subject before jetting off to Hawaii for another taxpayer funded regal vacation. Congress has already risen to the bait as well.
The FBI could not find Patty Hearst. Why would I believe they could figure out who hacked Sony.
I remind you of my original theory it was someone else.
The main thing that got my Spidey-Sense™ tingling was that the Norks denied it.
When have the North Koreans denied anything they were known to have done? Not in about 20 years, nowadays they brag about it and sometimes try to take credit for stuff they had nothing to do with.
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Then one expert was saying early on Sony’s security was so out of date any decent hacker could get in.
But the personal info dumped to embarrass every exec and star there does tend to point to the personal, like a disgruntled ex-employee.
There is a reason for the NORKS to deny that they had anything to do with this: Retaliation.
With the FBI saying that the NORKS were behind the Sony attack, that gives a LOT of legroom for the top donors at Sony (and other related entertainment companies) to make a nice, little side-meeting with President Obama the next time he comes to hit them up for “Donations” and say “If North Korea isn’t in the technological stone age by next month, we’ll donate every PENNY to the REPUBLICAN candidate in 2016 and you can kiss every single one of your ‘policy achievements’ goodbye.”
Obama then goes to Sec. Def., the DCI and DIRNSA and say “listen, we can’t have this little tin-pot dictator damaging our economy. Shut THEIRS down. Destroy EVERY asset that is connected to any network in any capacity, military and civilian.”
Trust me, when Kim Jong Un can’t get onto the internet because every router and switch in North Korea melted overnight, and none of his ‘inner circle’ have access to the instant communications that are the hallmark of the modern world, the regime will collapse under its own weight (pun intended).
Well, that was faster than I expected.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2014/12/north-koreas-internet-access-is-toast-developing/
The US gubmint would never lie to the public … would they? I’m still fuming about those North Vietnamese at the Gulf of Tonkin …
Does Eric Holder know that Obama is profiling NorKs?
What about the Obama’s Treasury? Their militant arm, IRS, have been acting suspiciously lately. There is also Holder’s DOJ.