North Korea Denies Responsibility for Sony Attack, Warns Against Retaliation

jones_supa writes: A North Korean official said that the secretive regime wants to mount a joint investigation with the United States to identify who was behind the cyber attack against Sony Pictures. An unnamed spokesman of the North Korean foreign ministry was quoted by the country's state news agency, KCNA, describing U.S. claims they were behind the hack as "slander." "As the United States is spreading groundless allegations and slandering us, we propose a joint investigation with it into this incident," the official said, according to Agence France-Presse. Both the FBI and President Barack Obama have said evidence was uncovered linking the hack to to North Korea, but some experts have questioned the evidence tying the attack to Pyongyang. Meanwhile, reader hessian notes that 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has offered to let the hacker community distribute The Interview for Sony. It's an offer Sony may actually find useful, since the company is now considering releasing the movie on a "different platform." Reader Nicola Hahn warns that we shouldn't be too quick to accept North Korea as the bad guy in this situation: Most of the media has accepted North Korea's culpability with little visible skepticism. There is one exception: Kim Zetter at Wired has decried the evidence as flimsy and vocally warns about the danger of jumping to conclusions. Surely we all remember high-ranking, ostensibly credible, officials warning about the smoking gun that comes in the form of a mushroom cloud? This underscores the ability of the agenda-setting elements of the press to frame issues and control the acceptable limits of debate. Some would even say that what's happening reveals tools of modern social control (PDF). Whether or not they're responsible for the attack, North Korea has now warned of "serious consequences" if the U.S. takes action against them for it.

Comments

Re:of course it wasn't NK

[Fwipp]

Thank you. I don't know why so much of Slashdot seems to be taking the obvious "it was NK omg" story at face value, even after NK explicitly denied it. They take credit for things they've never done - if they'd hacked Sony successfully, of course they'd be bragging about it.

Incompetence vs Conspiracy

[Gim Tom]

Do not attribute to a conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by incompetence -- especially if you won't show your evidence of said conspiracy. The company that thought a Root Kit was a good idea does seems to be lacking something in the competence department.

Re:Incompetence vs Conspiracy

[ChipMonk]

Sony, the company that thought it would be a good idea to use other computers in ways the computers' owners wouldn't want, now finds others using Sony's computers in ways Sony doesn't want.

Karma's a bitch.

False Falg?

[jmd]

The more this unravels the more I smell false flag.

Re:False Falg?

[hey!]

One thing every thoughtful fan of the mystery story knows is that in real life, motivation tells you very little about who done what. That's because *most* people, when faced with a problem, don't even consider murder. Murderers are not typical people.

The same goes for hackers. When companies first started putting Internet connections back in the 90s in I would explain that they need to start taking steps to secure their networks, and almost without exception the response was "Why? Why would anyone be interested in hacking *us*?" And I had to explain that the Internet was accessible to *everyone*, including people whose motivations and ways of thinking would make no sense to them.

Motivation may have limited use in perhaps identifying some possible suspects, but it's not probative of anything. You can't rule anyone out or in based on what you think their motivations are or should be. The only way to know that somebody has done something is by following the chain of evidence that leads to some concrete action they've taken.

Re:False Falg?

[daniel142005]

Thinking the same... I mean Target was hit, Home Depot, Chase, etc.. No one made a big deal about it until the MAFIAA got hit. Now it's suddenly a cyber 9/11? Sony is the only one to blame here.. They have been hit MULTIPLE times and still failed to secure their networks. It did however shed a lot of light on the questionable practices they're using to attack the internet and Google.

It's kind of sad, but I'm more inclined to believe North Korea than our own government on this one. Sony isn't even in the US... It's primarily based out of Japan. Where is Japan's response? They've barely even mentioned the incident. Honestly, I wouldn't even put it past Sony or another MAFIAA member doing it. A cyber 9/11 would benefit them in the sense that it would provide the fear-mongering to enact exactly what Sony wants.

Re: of course it wasn't NK

[O('_')O_Bush]

Except if your view was thought through to its conclusion, the NK would have claimed to have hacked Sony whether they did or did not actually do so. The fact that they regularly lie about what they have and haven't done makes any face-saving claim dubious.

And OJ offers a reward to find the real killer

[lurker412]

My first reaction was that it was like OJ Simpson offering a reward to find the real killer. But then I took off my snarky goggles and on reflection, I realized that given government, corporate and media interests and manipulation there's no way in hell we'll ever know the truth. Sad but true, I'm afraid.

Re:And OJ offers a reward to find the real killer

[BarbaraHudson]

North Korea has already said that they approve of the hacks. Now they want to "join in the investigation" and if they're refused, "something bad will happen?"

North Korea needs to be told in plain language "Get bent!" Whether they were the source or not is now irrelevant, given their latest threat.

There is no way that anyone else will let North Korea see how their intelligence service works, same as they don't show theirs to anyone else.

I doubt it was North Korea

[Todd Knarr]

For one thing, if North Korea was capable of this sort of hack they've got more tempting targets to use that capability on. And it's just a bit too convenient, coming on the heels of a disappointing performance by Sony, for SPE to suddenly get an excuse to get out from under another apparent flop. My bet is the hack's just another in a long string of breaches by the usual gangs of malcontents, aided and abetted by corporate obliviousness to security, and various parties are just taking advantage of superficial connections for their own reasons.

Country that forbids use to internet

[postmortem]

is cyber superpower?
I am not buying it. They could have smart people that would make talented hackers. But good luck finding them because they most likely don't even own a computer.

Re:of course it wasn't NK

[Frosty Piss]

I don't know why so much of Slashdot seems to be taking the obvious "it was NK omg" story at face value, even after NK explicitly denied it.

Ah yes, because the North Koreans have a history of being so honest and forthright?

Translation:

[jd2112]

We didn't hack you. but if you retaliate we will hack you again!

Think of the children!

[ihtoit]

If you're not with us, you're against us!
If you don't agree with me, you're a terrorist!
If you ignore this message then you're a supporter of child abuse! Copy this message to every forum you've ever heard of! ...And every other guilt-slap trope in existence.

Tell ya what, stick them up your arse and come back to me with credible evidence instead of the aforementioned bullshit.

Re:of course it wasn't NK

[ihtoit]

uh, what?

"We know Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11" (how?? They can't even explain how a PASSPORT survived a plane crash and subsequent inferno that burned through a building with enough intensity to *melt construction steel* and vapourise a black box flight recorder, without a scratch, and end up three blocks away in a plastic bag) "...so we'll invade them anyway using a two pronged pretext: that they did, and that they have WMDs." (we know they *did* have WMDs, Rumsfeld got caught shredding the shipping manifests. We also know they didn't have any more viable chemical weapons by the 1991 invasion because the desert conditions denatured the payloads and rendered the warheads inert)

Re:of course it wasn't NK

[AmiMoJo]

The Americans are not exactly known of their honesty either. Both are equally liable to be lying.

Re:of course it wasn't NK

[AmiMoJo]

Apperently we Americans are better at it, as *everything* coming out of North Korea lands as bombastic humor.

Believe it or not, most of what comes out of America sounds the same to the rest of the world. It's been toned down since Obama got in, from the height of the War on Terror (TM). More generally all the rhetoric about the US being the greatest country on earth and the daily pledge of allegiance that school kids are forced to recite seems awfully similar to what certain other countries do, which is probably no surprise as much of it was originally a over-reaction to Soviet propaganda.