North Korean Spy to Be Charged in Sony Pictures Hacking
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I've always been suspicious of the touted NK connection. It seemed flimsy then, and it seems flimsy now. However, all these years later, I don't know why they'd be interested in keeping up security theater, so I assume someone closer to it than I knows all the facts.
People are being trained to not believe data from any organized group
I agree with the analysis linking the groups.. however, the final conclusion is because the other attacks were attributed to NK, then we must also attribute these attacks to NK.
I think these assumptions need to be questioned.
The sophistication of the attacks is so out of proportion with North Koreas abilities, it almost reaches the point of absurdity.
I mean we're talking about an entire country full of people that are denied access to the internet, most do not have computers, and many don't even have the electricity to run them. We're talking about a country where refrigerators are luxury and purchased by the middle class to store books since they don't have steady electricity that would allow them to keep food cold.
When you look at the sophistication of the attacks, it's an amazing leap to assign such sophisticated cyber attacks to a country that runs it's entire computer infrastructure as an government controlled Intranet that people still access over dial-up modem.
I mean even just using Occams razor on the South Korean bank attacks...
You're going to require extremely educated people, who have the requisite hacking skill and mindsets, which often require unfettered access to information that is denied to most everyone, and small details like the fact that the attackers also are knowledgeable in multiple spoken languages and other things that are so out of the ordinary for NK.
What is more likely.. that all of these sophisticated attacks are being done by a country that can barely keep the power on, or that they are done by someone pretending to be North Korea and using them as a scapegoat?
Personally I think it's the latter.
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korean-hackers-working...
There's also the possibility that the APT group is partially or completely composed of foreigners hired to engage in these attacks on behalf of the DPRK. I know one of the people on Operation Blockbuster believed that this was "contracted out" to some clandestine group. This would explain the attackers being multi-lingual. It would also explain why many of their attacks focus on financial institutions and theft. This focus has been proposed as a way for the DPRK to get international currency to make purchases and evade sanctions, but it would also make sense for a group that is in it for the money.
Actually the whole "we don't like movies about Dear Leader" supposed motivation is only superficially reasonable. From the leaked email it's clear that this was a chaotic capricious organization that wouldn't have hesitated to fire embittered IT (or simply IT-aware) staff, who would then have been well-placed to do everything that was done to Sony. (I especially liked the unencrypted Word docs they had of nothing but hundreds of passwords. Passwords don't belong in Word docs!) "Guardians of Peace" had a special hatred for Sony execs, while e.g. Rogen and Franco were afterthoughts.
And if he did find himself in a court, a couple of professors and escapees can testify that unless he did what he did, he'd be in jail, along with all his extended family. Not guilty. Now maybe he didn't have to be that successful, but we don't know all details beyond reasonable doubt.
It's hard to imagine standing up to that.
https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korean-defector-jang-s...
"Mirim University produces most of the hackers that get placed in Bureau 121. It's a highly competitive program, with each class accepting only about 100 students out of 5,000 applicants. They take six 90-minute classes every day, learning different coding languages and operating systems, from C to Linux. Jang says a lot of time was spent dissecting Microsoft programs, like the Windows operating system, and how to attack the overall computer IT systems of enemy countries like the US or South Korea."
Also
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/north-korea/how-north-korea-rec...
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/913712/North-Korea-late...
My guess is that, like the incubator baby thing in Iraq, the more heinous crimes are just made up. It's easy to make up stories when there's no way to refute them.
The defector stories are already internally inconsistent. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-k...
EDIT: Would love to hear something counter in addition to the downvotes. Particularly against Shin Dong-hyuk's testimony which is hugely internally inconsistent, and also the basis for the idea of North Korea's concentration camps.
Also, the guardian article that you linked to literally states that just because there are inconsistencies doesn't mean that there aren't serious human rights abuses, including the existence of prison camps.
For camp 14, the supposed concentration camp, we have two eyewitnesses. Shin Dong-hyuk, and Kim Yong. Both of their stories are hugely inconsistent, and they get paid based on how crazy their stories are.
> For instance, we have satellite imagery of the prison camps.
We have satellite imagery that they have prisons. We don't have any imagery of abuses.
> Also, the guardian article that you linked to literally states that just because there are inconsistencies doesn't mean that there aren't serious human rights abuses, including the existence of prison camps.
Yeah, it's a Guardian article. You can't rock the boat too much.
I'm unclear on what exactly your position is. Are you just skeptical of stories like boiling people in molten iron? If so I can understand. Do you believe that these political re-education camps exist? What about the policy of sending an entire family, including children, to prison if one member of it commits a political offense? Do you believe that these camps are host to abuses, including the torture of prisoners as punishment, forced labor, and inadequate access to food and medical care?
Over a dozen prison camps. Camp 14 was the "hotel California" camp supposedly, the others are focused on rehabilitation and release.
> Dozens of people going back decades. And even if you consider the entirety of their testimony suspect, these witnesses bare the physical signs of torture and malnutrition.
Dozens of the literally tens of thousands of North korean defectors. But it's only the ones with the sketchy stories for some reason that get the limelight.
> And while I could only find those two you mentioned as eyewitnesses to camp 14, we have plenty of other witnesses to the other camps. Dozens of people going back decades. And even if you consider the entirety of their testimony suspect, these witnesses bare the physical signs of torture and malnutrition.
I mean, they were under sanctions during a famine. Nearly everyone was malnourished.
> Are you just skeptical of stories like boiling people in molten iron? If so I can understand.
Yes, skeptical to say the least.
> Do you believe that these political re-education camps exist?
I believe that prisons should be focused on rehabilitation and integration back into society, I guess you can call that "political re-education".
> What about the policy of sending an entire family, including children, to prison if one member of it commits a political offense?
I doubt that this exists. What's more likely is that political dissonance (which was outlawed by the US in times of war also), is hard to keep to an individual in the extremely family centric societies of the east, including North Korea and would tend to pull in family members who didn't report it.
> Do you believe that these camps are host to abuses, including the torture of prisoners as punishment, forced labor, and inadequate access to food and medical care?
I think that's true of nearly all prisons, including those in the US. And before you go calling "whataboutism", I think that's core to the distinction made between a "concentration camp" and a prison.
My main issue is how it gets portrayed as worse than the Nazis or Unit 731, when there's essentially no reliable evidence to the fact. All in a context where there's a push for a war with them, and we've manufactured evidence for the past few wars.
none of this is to say that the NK regime doesn’t commit atrocities. i’m certain some of the stories are true. i only mean to point out that there are perverse incentives that point exclusively in one direction.
It's also a nice way to prop up the "enemy du jour". You wine and dine some people who got out, and they'll tell any kind of horror story you'd like to hear.
Nation state hacking is like being one of the guys in a missile silo. Your job is to maintain the capability to hurt your enemy. You rarely actually do it though. You just hack media companies and fire off test missiles once in awhile. It's much easier to sleep at night being the guy who does that than being the guy who carts people's families off to the gulag or being the NSA analyst who has to go dig up dirt on politicians.
Why do you think this is so obvious? Why are Facebook employees oblivious to the atrocities they contribute to?
Taking domestic propaganda into account, do you think, as a North Korean, your country looks so much worse than the US? From the most cynical view of US foreign policy?
How many thousands of people work on the US nuclear weapon program - knowing full well the US is the only country to use nuclear weapons, on predominately civilian targets, twice?
Can you connect the dots for me?
I'd recommend reading the emails. They show just how badly Sony needed Marvel's help to make a good Spiderman. Here's my favorite http://imgur.com/XiqC6fz
Edit: Also Sony was trying to make their own Spiderman universe instead of being part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Disney has tried to get back as many as they could, and are continuing to do so. Off the top of my head, Universal currently owns theme park rights to Spiderman, Avengers, X-Men, and Fantastic Four on east-coast USA. In regards to film rights, Fox owns X-Men and Fantastic Four, and Sony owns Spiderman. One of the reasons Disney is pushing hard for acquiring Fox is to get back the X-Men rights from Fox, as that's the 'easiest' way to add them into the MCU.
Justice Department could have spent that money explaining "correct horse battery staple" (https://xkcd.com/936/) to its own people, and so made us all a bit safer.
As to explaining password security, the Justice Department is a law enforcement agency, not a security agency.