crime

Doubts remain on North Korean role in Sony attack

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could easily not be NK. remember Saddam's WMD?

9 ( +12 / -3 )

I think Obama may have jumped the gun on this one.

8 ( +8 / -0 )

Kaerimashita , I do agree with you

2 ( +3 / -1 )

Security firm Norse believes that at least one former Sony employee was involved with this hack. Apparently this employee was laid off in May and she was in contact with some black hat hacker groups located in US, Europe and Asia (Singapore, Thailand).

<https://securityledger.com/2014/12/new-clues-in-sony-hack-point-to-insiders-away-from-dprk/ >

Some independent Russian hackers may be involved but this doesn't look like a FSB job.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

Whether N.K. is the source of the hack is the subject of this article, but there definitely WAS a hack. The Obama administration isn't making the incident up out of thin air.

With every high-profile hack, these hackers are turning the "open" internet back into the closed network that was developed by DARPA. ISPs will be required to log all packet transactions and with every hack the courts are going to be just that much more lenient in granting search warrants of ISP records. Offshore ISPs will be subject to even more regulation than in-country ISPs or suffer having their address blocks banned nation-wide. When the threat to commerce from Chinese ISPs exceeds the benefit to commerce, all Chinese address blocks will be designated "non-routeable" in-country. I'm picking on China because any sort of attack from N.K. has to go through Chinese ISPs and because Chinese ISPs have been implicated in a bunch of other recent high-profile hacks, but the concept would hold true regardless of the country of origin. Once the impact of the hacks exceeds the economic benefit of the connection, the connection will be severed. The enablers will jump in and say that the hackers will just route their attack through another country that isn't blocking them. Very true, but the result will be the same. That new country will be blocked and told to fix their hack problem. If that new country want to resume internet with the U.S., they will fix their problem. If it's too much bother, their country will learn to get along without access to the U.S. It's not the U.S.'s responsibility to police some other country's internet. If the attacks from some other country become too much of a problem, that country's access gets severed.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

Uh.... I hang out with people who work and or worked for Sony. They have some disgruntled employees. Lots of them. Some of them are pretty darn smart too. Surely, some of them could of orchestrated the attack and covered it up with a smoke screen. It is definitely water cooler conversation here at the big tall decaying building on Via Esprillo in San Diego.

1 ( +3 / -2 )

The FBI and the Norse Corp, presenting their evidence about the "Lena" insider job and her ties to G.O.P., met yesterday and discussed their findings for 3 hours. The FBI still stand by their assertion that North Korea was behind the Sony hack.

The FBI is normally reliable and won't point something out unless they're on solid ground. The FBI cannot reveal how they got some of their info (and risk revealing secret capabilities), but they obviously have access to intelligence reports from other US agencies and from foreign governments' intelligence agencies - info that regular IT industry insiders would not be privy to. The insider job may just be the tip of the iceberg.

It's still not out of the realm of possibility that North Korean agents and the Sony inside-job hackers ended up helping each other - purposely or inadvertently. It's not always one or the other, especially since there's a thriving industry of hackers for hire.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Of COURSE there were no " WMD"s...just ask all those DEAD Kurds.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

SO as I was saying, they are still just guessing as they were with snowden, come on lets not be suckers and beleive what ever crap they want us to believe.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

After there are only abou 1,000 online users in NKorea, BBC reported, now expert language analylysts calim Russia. Hope some organization will find how many internet users in Russia and how many computers are used in Russia. Fortunately to Japan, no analysts are blaming Japan as source of hacker.

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a linguistic-based analysis of the malware by the Israeli-based security firm Taia Global said the native language of the hackers appeared to be Russian, not Korean.

The study concluded that the software authors were not native English speakers, and that the translation errors pointed away from the Koreans.

“We tested for Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Russian and German,” the report said. “Our preliminary results show that Sony’s attackers were most likely Russian, possibly but not likely Korean and definitely not Mandarin Chinese or German.”

Security experts note that it is relatively easy for hacker to route their attacks through third parties to fake their location and that is nearly impossible to conclusively show the source of an attack.

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Only Mandarine Chinese? After russia, which country will target hackers; native country?

0 ( +0 / -0 )

N.Korea or its affiliation has no right to impose censorship on free world. Yes, it might be the norm for N.Korea or communist China, but not America. Regardless, N.Korea has been hacking S.Korea, U.S., Japan with the help of their friends: China, Russia, even Iran now comes to the party as well. No sympathy for dictatorship scum bag.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

While I won't say the North Korean politbureau wasn't disappointed about the Sony hack, the probability of their doing the actual hack (actually multiple hacks) is low. The haul included stuff from multiple and therefore separate activities which would normally be protected by multiple firewalls, interior and exterior. This means an outside explorer would be hard pressed to even detect the files, much less extract them. The purloined movies are huge files, particularly if the pre-edit versions were carted out. The size of this caper makes the Los Alamos theft look like chump change. However, if we are looking at a soon to be former IT person who is still on the inside, that is a totally different situation and much easier to accomplish. This vote says Inside Job.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

FBI. it it has snitch(es) then it will inform that it has information after it places snitches to Federal Protection Programs. However, it does not mention it has information yet. Intelligence community has been changing stories. N Korea, then Russia. Maybe when they exhaust the country names, they may accuse Japan. Phony intelligence community seeking some suckers will give them contracts.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

I could see Russia being in on it, if not leading it by proxy (ie. NK), given the increase in tensions between the US and Russia in particular of late. It could also simply be a test by Russia on a very minor scale, cooperating with NK to give in credibility while also allowing it to take the blame, to see how leaking documents and making threats works out. It can be used as a model for future attacks on a larger scale and with larger scale economic enterprises.

-1 ( +5 / -6 )

No doubt from me over this. They did me a favour, allowing me to sell short on my Sony shares and make some quick cash.

Cheers Kim Jong Un, you lunatic!

-1 ( +2 / -3 )

@Son Which Sony are you writing? None of any SONY use water coolers in USA. People drink water bottles whichither they brought or in refregi in each room. I don;t know about Sony in Japan but not in SONY Pictures in Culver /city or Sopny Electronics in New Jersey. Not even Sony Studio in Las Vegas.

-1 ( +1 / -2 )

Jerome wrote excellent analysis. From beginning, I thought it was insider job. It is obvious Sony has entire movie in one filew in one computer. Insider can download the movie to a flash memory drive and put the flash memoy drive in is pocket, close original computer and go out. Sony should save movies in several separate files and save in different computers. The normal procedure to handle large files. It should consult its sister company of Sony Electronics.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

"The intelligence community would never have let (Obama) stick his neck out on this unless they had a high degree of confidence about this". Whom are they trying to fool? Not me. Not you, I hope. This "intelligence community" is outright dumb.They still believe in Saddam`s mass destruction weapons, they financed and armed the Isis against Bashar Al Assad, they created the chaos in Lybia. How can anyone besides the U.S. president trust those bozos?...

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

Fadamor; yeah, some good info in there, but it should also be considered that when an anonymous (lower case a) attack comes from a country like North Korea, the country is implicated as an administrative whole. When it comes from a group who admit the attack, which also happened to Sony and Microsoft with their PS4 and XBOX networks over xmas when Lizard Squad went on the rampage, there are no blockages of connections from wherever they come from, as they are not government affiliated. In that particular case, Kim Dotcom stepped in and sorted it all out, amusingly, because he was annoyed he couldn't play games at Christmas. Haha

-2 ( +1 / -3 )

Next day after some theaters showed this picture, S Korea anc China already released picture illegally. S Korea pic had funny translation of conversations that S Korean people could not understand. Chinese versions had no problem with fluent Chinese conversations. Made in Japan movies in USA use USA actors in conversations. Maybe Chinese versions employed Chinese speaking actors? Made in one day? Does Russian technologically super in the world? Better than Chinese or American ?

-3 ( +0 / -3 )

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