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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> It very well could be a DPRK actor, but let's please not kill perfectly valid discussion around attribution.

I'm starting to believe that "killing perfectly valid discussion around attribution" is part of the game itself, after all we have at least two persons in this HN comments thread (the OP, and some other guy above who explicitly said that he worked for intelligence) who have worked directly for or adjacent to (I guess that's how the OP got to see those NK-related IP blocks) Western government agencies that handle this sort of stuff.

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Given it's an official Google blog post related to a nation-state threat actor, somebody asking for valid attribution could be a way attackers try to:

1) Derail the conversation 2) Find out ways to further cloak their footprint

IMO if you've worked in the field, you know it's a dumb question meant to invoke something.

"Look! We've succeeded! We've dragged out 'w0z_' and have identified him as a possible (x)!"

Sadly, I am a nobody who happened to see DPRK not tunnel to a VPN.

> somebody asking for valid attribution could be a way attackers try to: 1) Derail the conversation 2) Find out ways to further cloak their footprint

Really? What does it take to sprinkle North Korea over my code? Is having the North Korean equivalent of JIS in strings enough? I mean, how could there possibly there be any footprint of anything. Does gcc leak info into the binary that my Debian system does not have in the first place? You need to get these guys when they are bragging to their friends. You can't look on the trails they leave behind ...

A lot of cyber security smells like bullet forensics.

If it matters I didn't mean to direct my comment at you personally (obviously, as I don't know you), but instead it was meant to target the generic security person who says that he/she has gotten in the "vicinity" of such state-sponsored attacks.

Back to the subject at hand, and taking a more general view, trusting a big Pentagon-contractor [1] (and not only) such as Alphabet on the subject of other countries' cyber-attacks against the US (and its Western allies) is just futile.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/pentagon-awards-9-bln-clo...

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