I did it.
I did it.
Think for yourself. Question authority.
It's just what our masters want us to think. WAKE UP SHEEPLE!Originally Posted by Jay Cunningham
(Although if I had to guess, the actual physical location was from someplace other than N. Korea and the actual fingers on the keyboard were not attached to a citizen of the DPRK.)
Last edited by Tamara; 12-19-2014 at 10:42 AM.
An 'organization' calling itself "The Guardians of Peace" have claimed responsibility. The only data point I've seen about it being traced to the Norks was 'Korean language settings in attack code'. Anyone skilled enough to pull this off a true 'door kick' hack like this would be skilled enough to leave that proverbial trail of bread crumbs to point at their patsy of choice.
There are legions of virtually unemployable but very, very skilled neckbeards in unwashed sweatpants that grew up with relative comfort in the first world in front of a PC and came to their skill level with all the dedication that socially awkward/rejected youth can bring when mixed with a desire to somehow influence their world and feel powerful by messing with everything they can that's connected to a network. Sure, there's likely a thousand pretenders to that sort of thing for every bona-fide skilled hacker, but that bona-fide neckbeard in his stinky sweatpants is *VERY* good at this sort of thing.
The idea of a group of North Koreans, western educated or not, beating out the angry neckbeards at their own game despite the huge advantage of 'milk language' experience simply doesn't parse with me.
The Chinese? Sure. Russians? Absolutely. Some chubby kid in an Estonian basement? Plausible. But the North Koreans? I just don't see it, unless they paid off someone with a ton of network access to give them a head start - and that sort of thing is very obvious after-the-fact and would almost surely be mentioned that inside help was involved.
This isn't the first time Sony's been the target of a very skilled & damaging cyberattack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlaySt...Network_outage
Now, in black-hat sorts of circles, the only thing better than poking a big bear once is poking it for a second time and getting away with as much data as you can.
A lot of very large private companies suffer very deep and wounding cyberattacks that we never hear about because there's absolutely no need to make a successful attack public unless it's absolutely necessary, as it only emboldens more hacking attempts - it's a shame the media doesn't take a similar approach with murders at schools - But most of the time, if one found or was made aware of a good digital copy of a yet-to-be-released album or movie, or a book for that matter, chances are it was taken directly from the host company's network and it best serves them and their business to downplay any intrusions and double-down on security behind the scenes. Oftentimes, we'll only hear about that album or movie being 'leaked' instead of it being a 'hack' or 'cyberattack'. A lot of stuff does just leave the building on a thumbdrive, but more of it is lost to network intrusions than most of those companies would ever care to admit.
Gov't agencies that suffer attacks are even less likely to talk about it - I'm sure more than a few of my fellow SM's and Gov employees are here on this website and know about how the Chinese successfully hacked countless US military & DoD networks by sprinkling random thumb drives loaded with attack software all over our various AO's in the world, to be picked up by Spc Snuffy and plugged into a DoD machine to see what was on the thumbdrive - and we learned it's a lot easier for an attack to break *out* of a protected network than *into* a protected network the hardest way possible, hence the current 100% ironclad policy of no thumbdrives or USB data storage devices on any DoD owned hardware, ever.
Now, when you're talking about something as big as Sony, there's plenty of reasons and avenues for an attack. It's a big 'bear' that's easy to see but the trick is finding out where to and how to poke it and get away with it. That could have come in the form of a disgruntled employee providing a beefy password to get through the 'front door', or that could have simply been an exploitable piece of security software running somewhere - but nobody's giving any meaningful details, but honestly I'd be surprised if they did.
As mentioned, Sony's had quite a number of other attacks that were substantially damaging - not as deep as this one, but those attacks came from all over and there's no telling what this level of a data breach could have gleaned to the attacker(s). We've already read about the huge amount of dirty laundry in various emails and other personal information that was taken, in addition to other movies - plenty of which got seeded on every major torrenting site on the planet.
Bottom line, my tinfoil is twitching, and I can't help but think this was timed cleverly to coincide with this movie's impending release to have a 100% media passable trouble-free patsy in North Korea. I also don't believe that the politicians now getting a media respite from this episode of bread & circuses are likely to scrutinize the hard facts of anything that diverts attention away from them.
My point, if that was slightly directed at me, was we have a culture led by the media and if there wasn't bigger news that these people would rather ignore, they'd be talking about Kim's arse rather than a movie being canceled on the grounds of hackery. Serious? Maybe. Our country's problem? Not really, but if it turns out the government needs to step in, it's not like it's something new we've never experienced before. What are we going to do next, appoint a Sony hacking czar?
Fairness leads to extinction much faster than harsh parameters.
Possibly...but don't overestimate how little spine there is in boardrooms.
3/15/2016
An organization (read: two sweaty guys in a basement) called "The Guardians of Peace" attacking a movie about jokingly killing North Korea's highly despotic fat little dictator. I got my chuckle for the day.
Semper Gumby, Always Flexible
Tam, two of your last three posts have consisted of histrionics suggesting that I have tinfoil on my head and that I'm a 9-11 Truther simply because I'm curious about this story.
You seem to be suggesting that if I don't immediately swallow this hook, line, and sinker - with zero questions asked - that I'm an unpatriotic nutcase raving about The Illuminati.
I think a healthy questioning attitude is a good thing in an adult. The other option is to suggest that corporations, the media, and our federal government never "embellish" explanations of events.
Welp, the FBI has fallen for it, too. It'll be lulzy with a capital "L" if we wind up in a shooting war and it was h4XX0rz in a Chula Vista basement pretending to be Norks.
Tangentially, I'm saddened that anything I read from Justice (or any branch of it) is immediately suspect.
Fresh tinfoil all around.
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." - Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Constitution, Draft 1, 1776
Genuine question: what do you guys hypothesize the FBI stands to gain by lying about this incident?
"If you run into an a**hole in the morning, you ran into an a**hole. If you run into a**holes all day, you're the a**hole." - Raylan Givens
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