Originally Posted by RevolverRob
I didn't mention the FBI, I asked if the North Koreans have actually mentioned the incident one way or another.
Folks, I think this thread is definitely drifting into some less than helpful territory, even given romper room.
I've held my tongue on a lot of this other than what one might do out here in the consumer space, but conspiracy theories are definitely not called for. Always keep in mind that there is much more that can and likely is known about any given cyber incident than what has been made public. It is easy to attract eyeballs to contrarian claims by folks not actually involved at the working level. It is much harder to tear apart hostile code and adversary operations structures. A WH level statement doesnt get made out of the blue. And while there are always politics, frankly this time those politics are largely about the statement not going far enough....
So the sky is falling?
I need a flowchart to track this.
Think for yourself. Question authority.
My post wasn't a response to yours, just an update on current events to the thread in general.
The most recent response from the Norks, which predates the formal accusation by the government of our country, was relayed thusly by the Beeb:
If the Norks have formally responded to today's statement by the US government, I have not yet read it.
Not in direct response to the Pres's talk today, but they denied it a couple days ago apparently.
http://news.yahoo.com/nkorea-denies-...061615361.html
Wow. I don't know what to say about that. It was fun to read, but it mirrors no reality I'm aware of. Not since, like, rms and esr were writing emacs.
No, seriously. That's up there among the funniest things I've ever heard.[...] beating out the angry neckbeards at their own game [...]
Is it? Obvious after-the-fact, I mean. And why would "a ton of network access" be a pre-req for the kind of exfil that we've learned about so far at Sony?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.
Now I'm confused. First, it takes a ninja squad of antisocial sweat-beards to hack much of anything. Next, hacking is easy, and any dork with a thumbdrive could pull a Snowden and check the movie listings to blame the most geopolitically convenient patsy. Which is 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
Either way, as for the idea that the PRNK is too computer-illiterate to pop SPE, I don't see that. I mean, PRNK have nukes. Weak ones, it seems, but still. Any agent that can pull that off, with or without alleged infrastructure and other assistance from commie-bastard countries in the general global vicinity, deserves consideration as being able to put together Operational Detachment Neckpants - tasked to buy a zeus variant at the flea market, send some emails, and wait for the clickstroke logs to come in. Or pay someone else's ODN to do a flying hack-kick on some cyberdoors. In fact, I personally grow a fantastic neck beard, and I'm a lot cheaper than the TAO - maybe I should call ADM Rogers with a little proposition?
Bottom line, I see a lot of holes in this line of reasoning. I hope I didn't offend with my response. In all honesty, I would love to hear a sound defense for all your points - since they don't jibe with my experience, I'm liable to learn a whole lot.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.
It was never about the movie, except maybe at the most superficial level. The people focused on that are the same people focused on, e.g., the Kardashian butts.
Is it? This is a very interesting question! What we do now will set some precedent. It may not be wise to do the "obvious" thing when you're dealing with mechanisms (HACKATTACK!) and contexts (the cyber domain of modern warfare) that we don't really understand. Unintended consequences can be a bitch...This is basically an act of war (just like lots of the other hacks that have come to light recently)
No. The sky fell in 1993 when AOL connected to the internet. The blood on your feet is from 20+ years of walking on the broken shards of a world where it was possible to disconnect.
The answer, it seems to me, is wrath. The mind cannot foresee its own advance. --FA Hayek Specialization is for insects.
I am reminded of this for some reason...
Good old Snowden. I won't comment on him. The fact is, we don't know what we don't know. But when it comes to national security, we can be sure that whatever we don't know, there's a lot of it. Myself, I'm reminded of the declassification of ancient recon birds. Or of the NSA's involvement with designing DES, and how it took a stupid amount of time, like 30 years, basically literally forever in terms of technology advance, for the public to know that the NSA had actually strengthened the algorithm. Or of any number of indicators, published in open sources, tending to show how the secret bowels of American government contain secrets we can't begin to guess at, and that in spite of a few spectacular breaches of the public trust, those bowels do a lot of dirty work in the best interest of the nation and its citizens. I don't believe that to be as true anywhere on earth as it is in the US.
The answer, it seems to me, is wrath. The mind cannot foresee its own advance. --FA Hayek Specialization is for insects.
I wasn't referring to him so much as the particular idea alleged in the article, and its implications in the uncharted waters of nation-states dabbling in the dawn of cyber warfare to which you had also referred.
The article I linked was the result of a hasty Google search, and I only skimmed the opening grafs to see if it was referring to the same thing, so I'm not sure it contained the illustration I was looking for (the one I recollect from back in August), which was "What happens if you have automated counter attacks set up, and the people who attack your (power grid/defense IT architecture/whatever) have done it through a third party, so that when R2D2 goes to shoot back at Unit 121, it burns the servers of an Estonian hospital to the ground instead?"
The meatspace version of this has happened in the past, usually with cruise missiles.
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