N. Korea Blames US For Internet Outage, Compares Obama to "a Monkey"

Reuters reports that North Korea's government has publicly blamed the U.S. for the widespread internet outages that the country has recently experienced (including today), and taken the opportunity to lambaste President Obama, as well. From the article: The National Defence Commission, the North's ruling body, chaired by state leader Kim Jong Un, said Obama was responsible for Sony's belated decision to release the action comedy "The Interview", which depicts a plot to assassinate Kim. "Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest," an unnamed spokesman for the commission said in a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency, using a term seemingly designed to cause racial offence that North Korea has used before.

Comments

More moaning and groaning for nothing.

[BarbaraHudson]

Looks like North Korea is the paper tiger. And Kim Jong Un needs a new speech-writer - the republican base claims prior art.

Re:More moaning and groaning for nothing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a brief side note: Un is the second half of his first name. Kim is the surname. The Korean language (like most Asiatic languages) put the surname first. First names are almost always two syllables in Korean, and are hyphenated. They don't have middle names there. Here in the 'States, it would be like having the name "Sara-Jane Smith", or "Suzy-Beth Jones." So, if they were Korean, it'd be "Jones Suzy-Beth", or "Smith Sara-Jane."
Unless you were just using the middle name to differentiate him from his father (like Americans do when they say "George W," In which case I'm just being a pedantic idiot.

Re:More moaning and groaning for nothing.

[Zontar The Mindless]

One nitpick: The hyphenation thing is a Westernism and somewhat antiquated at that. None of the Chinese I know (including my wife and her relatives) use it when writing their names in Latin characters or Hanzi. Generally they just write their given name as one word. According to Wikipedia, this is standard and you should write "Wang Xuiying" and not "Wang Xiu-Ying" for a member of the Wang family named Xiuying when rendering his name in Latin characters.

Chinese who travel generally give their family name last when speaking to Westerners, and many if not most of those who do so often or who live abroad adopt Western given names. Sometimes this is one that resembles their Chinese given name, sometimes not.

Re:More moaning and groaning for nothing.

[nitehawk214]

Also in South Korea, over 2/5ths of the entire population are either Kim, Lee, or Park. Surnames have a different meaning over there than in the West.

So Ted Nugent is their propagandist?

[jlowery]

There are more facets to Mr. Poopypants than I imagined..

Prediction:

[daveschroeder]

Many of the same slashdotters who accept "experts" who claim NK didn't hack Sony will readily accept as truth that it was "obviously" the US that attacked NK, even though there is even less objective proof of that, and could just as easily be some Anonymous offshoot, or any number of other organizations, or even North Korea itself.

See the logical disconnect, here?

For those now jumping on the "North Korea didn't hack Sony" bandwagon that some security "experts" are leading for their own political or ideological reasons, including using rationales as puzzling and pedestrian as source IP addresses of the attacks being elsewhere, some comments:

Attribution in cyber is hard, and the general public is never going to know the classified intelligence that went into making an attribution determination, and experts -- actual and self-appointed -- will make claims about what they think occurred.

With cyber, you could have nation-states, terrorists organizations, or even activist hacking groups attacking other nation-states, companies, or organizations, for any number of motives, and making it appear, from a social and technical standpoint, that the attack originated from and/or was ordered by another entity entirely.

That's a HUGE problem, but there are ways to mitigate it. A Sony "insider" may indeed -- wittingly or unwittingly -- have been key in pulling off this hack. That doesn't mean that DPRK wasn't involved. I am not making a formal statement one way or the other; just saying that the public won't be privy to the specific attribution rationale.

Also, any offensive cyber action that isn't totally worthless is going to attempt to mask or completely divert attention from its true origins (unless part of the strategic intent is to make it clear who did it), or at a minimum maintain some semblance of deniability.

At some point you have to apply Occam's razor and ask who benefits.

And for those riding the kooky "This is all a big marketing scam by Sony" train:

So, you're saying that Sony leaked thousands of extremely embarrassing and in some cases damaging internal documents and emails that will probably result in the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment being ousted, including private and statutorily-protected personal health information of employees, and issued terroristic messages threatening 9/11-style attacks at US movie theaters, committing dozens to hundreds of federal felonies, while derailing any hopes for a mass release and instead having it end up on YouTube for rental, all to promote one of hundreds of second-rate movies?

Yeah...no.

Re:Prediction:

[The New Guy 2.0]

The reporting on the hacking seems to be missing something... what hole did they use, or was this just a password leak? What were the other movies (We know about "The Interview"...) that were affected by this hack?

Re:Prediction:

[daveschroeder]

First of all, you say, "North Korea didn't hack Sony," as if it is an indisputable, known fact. It is not -- by any stretch of the imagination.

The fact is, it cannot be proven either way in a public forum, or without having independent access to evidence which proves -- from a social, not technical, standpoint -- how the attack originated. Since neither of those are possible, the MOST that can be accurate stated is that no one, in a public context, can definitively demonstrate for certain who hacked Sony.

Blameless in your scenario is the only entity actually responsible, which is that entity that attacked Sony in the first place.

Whether that is the DPRK, someone directed by the DPRK, someone else entirely, or a combination of the above, your larger point appears to be that somehow the US is to blame for a US subsidiary of a Japanese corporation getting hacked -- or perhaps simply for existing.

As a bonus, you could blame Sony for saying its security controls weren't strong enough, while still reserving enough blame for the US as the only "jackass".

Bravo.

Re:Prediction:

[fustakrakich]

At some point you have to apply Occam's razor and ask who benefits.

At some point... Yeah, the very first thing to ask would be that.

So, you're saying that Sony leaked thousands of extremely embarrassing and in some cases damaging internal documents...

Or anybody shorting the stock... It took a dip for a while and is now rebounding.

Please, people, get the silly politics out of your heads. This is strictly business. Could be some soap opera between Sony, Samsung, and LG, who knows, who cares, aside from the drama and intrigue for somebody's next movie.

Re:Prediction:

[Marginal Coward]

Quite right. In summary: none of us here in the peanut gallery have any real way to know who did what. Most of the opinions I've seen here seem to reflect whatever biases each opiner may have. The known facts are few and far between. Of course, I have my own opinions but I won't share them because they reflect my own biases.

This thing is a bit like an Agatha Christie mystery. You may be certain who did it, but you don't really know until Christie tells you. Then you invariably find out you were wrong. Even the strategy of picking the least likely culprit doesn't work. Unfortunately, in this case, we don't have the author to tell us the "truth", so we likely will never know.

Re:Prediction:

[wonkey_monkey]

You should save that comment. I think you could use it in at least 80% of stories and be bang on-topic.

Re:Didn't they announce it?

[ArcadeMan]

Cutting North Korea's Internet access is just a trial run, the real objective is to cut Internet access to everyone in the U.S.A.

Re:Didn't they announce it?

[morcego]

Cutting North Korea's Internet access is just a trial run, the real objective is to cut Internet access to everyone in the U.S.A.

Isn't Comcast already doing exactly that?

I take offense

[frovingslosh]

I take offense at the comparison. I like monkeys.