North Korea

I seriously doubt that North Korea actually had anything to do with the Sony hack. First off, I really doubt that they have a native cyber capability, given how reliant they are on controlling information and a military branch having access to information that goes against their propaganda would be very dangerous. That means they would have had to contract out, and that isn't North Korea's style. Even if everything they have is of foreign origin, Pyongyang likes to market its military abilities as homegrown, and if they did possess the ability to breach corporation security, their target would probably be a nuclear or missile program to help them along. The fact that they didn't accept responsibility makes me think that North Korea had no idea until they heard it on the news, and are trying to capitalize on the situation.

To be fair North Korea DOES have internet access although it's reserved for an select few. But maybe they're smarter than we think and actaully pulled off the cyber hacking.

North Korea hacks South Korea all the time, and vice versa.

They don't need a good native cyber nettwork to launch an attack - I remember reading that the main attack was traced to a Thai hotel (update: here's a link). Such an anonymous source means it could have been done by North Korean agents, a cyber attack group loyal to the government or even just a lone hacker or two doing it for some other reason. There was also strong evidence of using knowledge from within the company, which indicates anything from a disgruntled emplyee to a dude with a girlfriend on the inside (gender of either or both may vary :) ) or just a very successul tech support scam that an employee fell prey to.

Cyber attacks are a great leveller - I'm a little surprised that large enterprises and even governments aren't being blackmailed by the threat of days-long outages all the time by script kiddies the world over.

edited 29th Dec '14 2:09:30 AM by betaalpha

Well, to be frank, apparently Sony Pictures had terrible cybersecurity. Apparently, amongst the files that were uploaded to the internet, are entire databases of accounts and passwords that are entirely unencrypted in plain text. The Playstation Network hacks uncovered the same glaring hole.

Remind me to not create an PSN account...

Is Microsoft any better? I'm considering bgetting an Xbone.

You'd be surprised how terrible corporate security actually is. I've worked for too many companies where the security was all pointed inward at the employees; places where you had to wrestle with the IT department to even obtain access to basic tools for doing your job and could receive the hammer of managerial intervention for so much as changing the display settings of your monitor, but all of it hosted on a network protected by an outdated copy of default Windows Firewall.

Corporate security these days has nothing to do with keeping hackers out and everything to do with keeping incompetent goldfish employees' stupid asses from ruining the entire company by touching things they shouldn't be touching with their stupid goldfish employee hands. It's actually rather offensive. The entire company is extremely vulnerable to external attack, but you can be damn certain you're going to need a security clearance card to even enter the bathroom.

And then some companies fail at that, such as one company I worked for where IT got lazy and didn't want to do a system update, so they sent the administrative access password in a mass email to the entire company with instructions on how to do it yourself.

I'm not surprised Sony has terrible cybersecurity. I've yet to meet an IT guy who even understands what cybersecurity is.

edited 29th Dec '14 9:00:35 AM by TobiasDrake

Internal security is offensive but (looking at Sony's example) somewhat justified - the hackers did so much damage because they apparently had collusion from someone from inside the organisation (or maybe they did some really effective social engineering and got employee passwords).

edited 29th Dec '14 9:35:10 AM by betaalpha

Heh, i remember that with the jackholes i worked with early last year. I got several talkings-to about changing my desktop background and browsing the net (despite the fact that they didn't, you know, block it if they didn't want us on there), and yet their major system dated from the 1970s, was DOS-based and powered by a Java applet. They did get hacked in time and lost all kinds of information, and that was *after* the government figured out that they were cheating on their contract anyway.

Well this is an big shocker to me.

One would expect an company to have better cyber security than that.

edited 29th Dec '14 8:31:12 PM by RabidTanker

Most companies and even countries are behind the times as far as IT goes, mostly because replacing perfectly working hardware / software for new stuff and constantly replacing or retraining personal to deal with the new hardware / software. Technology is moving faster than companies can keep up.

However, if North Korea did have a cyber capability, they probably wouldn't squander it on a company that only moderately annoyed them with what turned out to be a mediocre comedy. They want to show the world that they are a global military power, and they would have used that capability to attack targets they consider more important. They would have tried to shut down Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, or Raytheon and tried to steal missile information. The higher ups know what they're doing and play their cards in a reasonable fashion. This smells like a non-state actor if I've ever seen one.

Those would not actually be high profile in the PR department and would have gotten a completely different response from the US. Sony is a soft target and most likely a test in capabilities and effects of what hacking like that could do.

Sony is a much softer target than anything that ties into military weaponry (especially missile technology). Hell the fact that Sony could be hacked at all throw up a massive red flag, any organisation with important stuff to hide (like weapons tech) doesn't keep in somewhere that can be accessed via the Internet, they keep it on a secure intranet that can only be accessed from within the organisation's premisses.

Plus if the suggestion of insider help is true than that would explain even more, insider help appears where it appears and you work with what you've got, plus getting someone on the inside of a military contractor to turn is going to be a lot hard than someone grumpy person in Sony's IT department.

edited 30th Dec '14 1:52:03 PM by SilasW

Indeed. I would also add that this might be a win for NK's government (whether they were responsible for this or not). Last I heard, Sony have not recouped their losses from making the movie yet and Hollywood has been shown the consequences of making mainstream movies that insult their Dear Leader. As an apparent result of this another NK-critical movie (one that might have been much better and more influential) has been dropped. I hope I'm wrong, and Hollywood rediscovers its balls enough to demonstrate with future releases that terrorism doesn't work, but sadly, sometimes it does.

edited 30th Dec '14 2:39:27 PM by betaalpha

If North Korea was behind the hack at all. The FBI's evidence does not add up.

Pyongyang wants to get talks with Seoul up again as seen in local papers in Hong Kong.

The Glorious Leader has accepted an invitation to Moscow this spring, celebrating the 70. anniversary to the end of WW2. First time he leaves the country since taking power.

A South Korean news agency says this move is intended to strengthen relations with Russia while Chinese relations with NK are still "cool".

Maybe another meteor will hit russia in that time...

News on the Sony attack: US attribution to N. K. based partly on its own existing electronic surveillance of Norkor hacking efforts.

Quick Question, but does anyone here have any books to recommend to help with understanding how things are in NK? An autobiography from an escapee would be extremely my shit.

Escape form camp 14 is on my eventual reading list, but I'm hoping for something that would give insight into how your average citizen lives and thinks.

I feel kinda stupid fr having thought NK had done that shit to Sony and getting riled up about it...

I rather liked this graphic novel, by an artist who stayed in the country while outsourcing cartoon animations to the workers there: http://www.amazon.com/Pyongyang-A-Journey-North-Korea/dp/1897299214 . Mind, it's 11 years old by now. But easy to absorb.

edited 21st Jan '15 5:51:19 AM by betaalpha

Try The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-hwan, about his time at Penal Colony 15. For a book on NK generally, try The Real North Korea by Andrei Lankov.

edited 21st Jan '15 6:59:28 AM by Achaemenid