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Sony Employees Receive Email Threat From Hackers: 'Your Family Will Be In Danger
MojoKid writes: Things are going from bad to worse when it comes to the recent Sony Pictures Entertainment breach. Not only has sensitive financial information been released — including the salaries of high-ranking Sony executives — but more damaging personal information including 47,000 Social Security numbers of employees and actors have been leaked to the internet. We're now learning some even more disturbing details, unfortunately. Guardians of Peace (GOP), the hackers claiming responsibility for infiltrating Sony's computer network, are now threatening to harm the families of Sony employees. GOP reportedly sent Sony employees an email, which just so happened to be riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, that read in part, "your family will be in danger."
The issue is that the SSN is used for identification. In Belgium we also have a national number. Pretty easy. in Dutch yet this only links to you and does not identify you as such.
Everybody above 12 needs to have an ID. Checking vadility is free and the chip on it is opensource
Oh and if you are a financial company, you can do verification at the national bank where you can check if you are allowed to give people a credit or not and add that you gave people a credit.
With just the number, you can do nothing. You would at least have the (valid) ID card as well.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Anyone can send an email. I'm not sure how they know for certain gop sent the email and not some random 13 year old with bad english skills.
It would certainly be a great way to discredit gop too. Just have someone send an over the line email claiming to be gop. The fbi, a private contractor, etc.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
11 PM? How many use PM?
It's? - How many non-natives use that?
Your? - How many get that right?
It's your false if you think this crisis will be over after some time. - This is perfect except for the "false" bit. How many get that right (and false wrong)?
The rest reads more like a purposeful mash of language, but not bad in the right places, and all too much right. These are not NORKs. These are very likely home-grown baddies. That's U.S. of A. for those from the outer reaches.
Another clue is the grammatical style used. I have to think that any official DPRK hacking group would have close ties to the government, and any press releases or emails would be written by someone with the official news/media services there.
Not necessarily. This isn't an official communique from the N. Korean government. Remember, they denied involvement. My gut feeling is that it was written by the head of cyber warfare unit.
I do think they're capable of it. Their cyber warfare unit has plenty of experience hacking S. Korean targets. They are not noob at all. They employ thousands and the competition to join is fierce. Cyber warfare unit members get top-notch treatment such as getting enough food to eat and your own apartment, which are rare luxuries there. Even though we tend to think of N.Korea as a dirt-poor stone age nation, they have their own nukes and missiles. They managed to put a satellite in orbit. They send their best and brightest to Russia and China for training.
About the threats to Sony: seems to me like it was written by a Korean with a poor book learning of English. Also seems like a dictionary translation. I've seen English written by such people, and this has the same flavor.
"It's your false if you think this crisis will be over after some time." - this definitely sounds like something a Korean would write while looking up words in a Korean-English dictionary. He's probably thinking of "shil-soo" which means a mistake, but if you look it up in a 1960's paperbound dictionary, "false" is one of the entries! "Some time" is also commonly used by dictionary Koreans because there's a specific noun in Korean that means "Short interval of time", but English has no such noun. A fluent English speaker would use an adjective or an adverb to express himself, but a dictionary Korean would look for an equivalent noun and use whatever he found in the dictionary.
Thus "It's your mistake if you think this crisis will be over shortly" becomes "It's your false if you think this crisis will be over after some time."
the English speaker isn't misunderstanding, they're being intentionally misled. That is a very big difference. They are perfectly understanding the intended message.