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Comment by Estragon | Hacker News Reader

Typical for the NYT to bury the strong countervailing evidence against the official war-mongering story in a couple of paragraphs 2/3rds of the way through the article.

  Still, the sophistication of the Sony hack was such that many experts
  say they are skeptical that North Korea was the culprit, or the lone
  culprit. They have suggested it was an insider, a disgruntled Sony
  ex-employee or an outside group cleverly mimicking North Korean
  hackers. Many remain unconvinced by the efforts of the
  F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to answer critics by disclosing some
  of the American evidence.
  
  ... it would not be that difficult for hackers who wanted to appear to
  be North Korean to fake their whereabouts.

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The sophistication of the attack is pretty questionable IMO. The malware used can be purchased by anyone on the black market and had been used before by Iranian hackers in 2012. Furthermore, spearphishing emails were used to get inside the network. Furthermore, how would sophistication be evidence against a State actor with (a reported) 7,000 personnel?

When I hear "sophisticated" in the context of a breach, I think "we weren't paying attention"

There is absolutely differing levels of sophistication in cyber attacks. The presence of new exploits, clever persistence mechanisms, evidence of a staged attack involving multiple targets (i.e. attacking a company through a compromised vendor, using a certificate from a prior breach), ability to break out of security boundaries like hypervisors, custom malware, jumping of air gaps, handling of multi-factor authentication, clever use and depth of renaissance, ability to change tactics in response to detection, specialization across multiple security contexts, highly scoped and pre-planned operations; these are some things that suggest higher levels of sophistication.

Unfortunately the term is thrown around pretty loosely, limiting the usefulness of the term.

Yep, exactly.

Stuxnet was sophisticated.

The Sony hack likely wasn't. Though it was done by a persistent and patient group of attackers.

Typical for Hacker News posters (in general) to dislike the United States government so much that, despite having complained and worried and speculated about the sophistication of the NSA's online snooping for the last year in a half, they assume that the government couldn't possibly have obtained any evidence they didn't want to release to the public, instead trusting the high certainty of experts who have decided that it couldn't have been North Korea because the Korean region setting is for the South Korean dialect or the writing didn't have the right 'Korglish' errors or other such trivialities (those are both actual points that have been made).

It's not as if the claims in this article that the U.S. has successfully penetrated North Korean networks (to the extent they exist, anyway) should be any surprise; it would be highly surprising if they hadn't. One might imagine that while the North Koreans are not super advanced, they know enough about how to analyze and remove malware that it might be better to stay vague, even at the cost of appearing less credible, rather than disclose specifics of what communications you're able to intercept. Yet surely, just because the finger is pointing at one of the usual enemies, it must just be warmongering rather than reflecting reality.

(Yes, yes, WMDs in Iraq. It is certainly possible that the U.S. really is that incompetent and/or hawkish. I just don't think it's very likely.)

> Yes, yes, WMDs in Iraq.

The USG has lied like a rug about the causus belli and operations of most of its major military adventures since WWII.

If they had convincing evidence of NK involvement, they would find a way to share it without further compromising the collection method. Since the Snowden leaks, every non Anglo Saxon government in the world has had to assume the NSA has its hand up the ass of its IT infrastructure.

Does anyone not believe they had similar access to Iraqi systems before either of the wars? The problem with good intelligence is that sometimes it doesn't mesh with your political goals.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap

"Realizing that mere belief in the gap was an extremely effective funding source, a series of similarly nonexistent Soviet military advances were constructed in a tactic now known as "policy by press release." "

There is no information anywhere exactly on what the attack entailed or how it was carried out. So if it is a 1 on the sophistication scale or a 10 is anyones guess.

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