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FBI: North Korean Hackers "Got Sloppy", Leaked IP Addresses
An anonymous reader writes "The FBI launched a PR counterattack against skeptics of the assertion by the US government that North Korean hackers were responsible for anonymous threats received by Sony before its scheduled premiere of the film The Interview. Sony initially cancelled the Christmas day release, but later relented after receiving extensive criticism. In a speech at a New York City cybersecurity conference hosted by Fordham University, FBI Director James Comey said that while the attackers concealed their identify by using proxy servers, on occasion they "got sloppy" and made direct connections, exposing their true IP addresses; these indicated a North Korea origin. Comey also mentioned additional corroborative evidence, including patterns matching those seen in previous attacks known to have come from North Korea, but was guarded on details. Also at the Fordham conference, US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper mentioned recently meeting the Kim Yong Chol, the North Korean general in charge of cyberwarfare. Clapper emphasized Kim's belligerence and lack of a sense of humor, implying that an advance screening of "The Interview" would likely have enraged and provoked the North Korean brass."
How do they know that the connections from North Korea weren't proxied themselves?
If I was going to launch a hack as major as the Sony one, I'd absolutely 100% be sure to leave some breadcrumbs (perhaps even multiple trails) to cover my own tracks.
Cliche movie quote: "he's clean...too clean..."
Seriously? Who writes this stuff?
The CIA.
Until now, I believed it was North Korea.
But the US government always lies. I'm starting to doubt!
Sometimes, Occam's razor comes to bear.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Listening to his speech is like sitting through a Transformers movie. You know the words, and you know the terms, but theyre all used in an entirely incoherent fashion. James seems to think hacking works just like a James Bond film in that its all about time. hackers that 'disconnect quickly' wont be found and those that 'get sloppy' will be detected by some ostentatious array of flashing lights and sirens attached to a mainframe.
James hasnt pulled his star wars head out of his NCIS ass and given any pertanent information like how hackers breeched sony, what attack vectors were used, what exploits were performed (if any) and what if any IDS or firewall technology was complicit in the breech. So given the lack of seriously technical information surrounding this leak its more than plausible by Occams Razor that Sony was the result of a simple phishing attack or bruteforce. Its also a little too convenient that a country which outright bans american films and that would never have to tolerate its citizenry watching it, happens to care enough to make a retaliatory strike against what for all intents and purposes is a nonthreat. What IS however quite possible is a disgruntled employee simply decided to dump the mail server to the pirate bay, and because you can as a business affect an insurance claim against hackers, its convenient to do so in the face of a movie that will in all likelyhood barely break even.
Good people go to bed earlier.
>And now the US' FBI has launched a rebuttal to crickets chirping on Slashdot.
Then you haven't read article after article, plain and simple.
Bruce Schneier and Marc Rogers are two sources that should have convinced you. But they didn't. Because you didn't read their summaries on this. Because you're _not_ reading "article after article."
North Korea denies North Korea attacked Sony. Everybody else pretty much agrees North Korea did it... including North Korea, who claimed Sony was committing an act of war...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Is this the same James Clapper who lied to Congress, and now expects us to believe him?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yup, definitely North Korea! There is no possibility that anyone could have setup a proxy account on some North Korean IPs. Apparently that would never happen. Nope, not one iota of possibility. Those were definitely the originating IP addresses.
Here is what I see as possible:
1. North Korea managed to develop an acceptable army of hackers on their own in 5 years. (No internet in 2009, supposedly)
2. A group of hackers attacked Sony and North Korea managed to get tangled up in this with the release of the Interview.
3. China managed to help North Korea develop a group of hackers in 5 years.
4. Koreans from South Korea or Japan (There are several in Japan trying to get into government positions) who actually proxied into North Korea and executed the attack. (Samsung?)
5. Koreans in the US or elsewhere in the world managed to execute the this attack via proxy because they really don't like Sony?
6. Cyber Command or some other US agency decided to execute the attack, because let's rally the troops against North Korea because Syria is getting old?
7. Sony managed to pull off the entire thing because, "Rootkit 2005?"
More possibilities, but as this list grows longer, the realm of possibility gets less likely.
Place something witty here
Yup, definitely North Korea! There is no possibility that anyone could have setup a proxy account on some North Korean IPs.
Do you understand how impossible it is to get "a proxy account" into or out of North Korea? Clearly you do not. The have only one single block of IPv4 addresses.
The "got sloppy and leaked IP addrs" sounds like the same way the Silk Road server was found. I wonder what parallel construction existed (NSA?) telling the FBI where to look, and what to look for. Of course, we'll never hear those details because, "National Security".
Seriously? Who writes this stuff?
Sony's script writing department.
Can't you tell they've gotten a lot better, lately?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
"Clapper emphasized Kim's belligerence and lack of a sense of humor, implying that an advance screening of "The Interview" would likely have enraged and provoked the North Korean brass."
Well FUCK ME: if Kim Yong Chol can't take a little "jokey-joke" then obviously it was DPRK who stole the cookies from the cookie jar!
"FBI Director James Comey said that while the attackers concealed their identify by using proxy servers, on occasion they "got sloppy" and made direct connections, exposing their true IP addresses; these indicated a North Korea origin."
Well SHIT: apparently when the attackers connect from Eastern Europe: "it's a proxy server" but if they connect from an IP address inside a regime the CIA has a hard-on for pressuring economically: it's a smoking gun.
"Comey also mentioned additional corroborative evidence, including patterns matching those seen in previous attacks known to have come from North Korea, but was guarded on details"
BLAH BLAH "secret evidence" BLAH: here's the problem with sticking your nose up everyone's ass Clapper, even when you "know" something is a fact: nobody believes you because the evidence was gathered through spying and deciept! Even if you manage to fabricate some "parallel" construction without revealing which routers on the TREASURE MAP are poisoned: nobody will fucking believe you because you've lost all credibility.
Essentially, the FBI is saying "Trust us: you know we're hacking everyone else so you can trust us when we say we have SECRET EVIDENCE that North Korea hacked Sony". Everything else is just confirmation bias bullshit.
I'm by no means a penn-tester, but I know the routine well enough to say that claims of attack heuristics having unique or distinct fingerprint are pretty fucking sketchy. 2/3rds of Penn-testers never have to do more than litter "SEX TAPE" cds/usb thumb drives in the parking lot, run a metasploit scan, set up a fake wifi hotspot, or ARP-Spoof the router to get everything they need for total network rape.
If a random hacker owns my box using these tactics, did North Korea do it because we've seen them run Metasploit scans before?
This shit was obviously a for-profit hack which went pear shaped, and then the State Deparment/defense Intelligence/cyber-warfare wing jumped on this shit like a bunch of opportunist dogs in heat. Not the case? Then how about some of that transparency Obama promised us and they can pull the viel off the SECRET EVIDENCE or STFU and quit wasting everyone's time pretending they need an excuse to put economic sanctions on North Korea.
Do it cause "glorious leader has a bad haircut" for all I care, but stop pissing on us and telling us it's raining: I'm sick of being lied to be these assholes.
"We know it, but won't tell you. Trust us".
Sorry, FBI, but I don't trust you this > much. Based on experience.
(Not that I trust -- or somehow like! North Korean regime, mind you).
Clapper lid to Congress under oath. What are the odds he'll tell the truth at a random conference?
I don't feel like looking it up, but I'm fairly sure I remember news stories about the FBI lying as well. (To the FISA court? I forget.) Anyway, their word is meaningless. They are without honor.
It must be true, Colin Powell brought a vial to the United Nations Security Council, and claimed it contained a 99.9999% pure North Korean IP.
Playing devil's advocate, it's possible that it wasn't the North Koreans who '"got sloppy" and made direct connections, exposing their true IP addresses'. Another explanation would be that some other group is responsible and got clever, routing attacks via North Korea to shift the blame.
Bruce Schneier and Marc Rogers are two sources that should have convinced you. But they didn't. Because you didn't read their summaries on this. Because you're _not_ reading "article after article."
Actually I read those articles and all they introduced was plausible deniability. Which could be done with any hack ever performed. Congratulations. Meanwhile the US names the individuals they think are responsible and even explains how they came to those conclusions. Schneier and Rogers are brilliant and great unbiased reporters in all things technical. But they're not exactly hands on with the data forensics in this case which puts them at a disadvantage.
Let's rephrase the question: what exactly would the US Government have to release to you in order to believe it was the DPRK that committed this hack? Oh, you're so opposed to that idea that your theory of "North Korea is not involved in the attack" has no falsifiable scenario? Then these debates are pointless.
The CIA has learned over the decades that it really doesn't matter how many times you fuck up, or how awful and short-sighted your intelligence is, or even how many international incidents you cause or stupid wars you help start. All that matters is how well you bullshit the American people. And the American people are pretty easy to bullshit.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Satire should NEVER be illegal.
Just go ask Salman Rushdie, a man who risked his own life by refusing to back down from his novel in the face of very real threats to his life. He'll tell you, like he did regarding the Charlie Hebdo attacks, that satire "has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity." Neither you, me, a state, or a group of religious fanatics should get to say what speech is or is not acceptable.
Perhaps you never saw Naked Gun 2 1/2? Team America? If I really felt like it, I could dig up quite a few comedies where we assassinate the living leader of a country that is considered to be the bad guy. Strangely, you think you're unique and this occasion was unique. Not going to go on about free speech but the irony is pretty intense when you consider the lack of human rights in North Korea.
There is no contradiction here... lots of skilled people do sloppy work on occasion, especially on something drug out over weeks. Just ask any programmer if they've ever written a bug.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
"Everybody else pretty much agrees North Korea did it... "
Wait, what? I was under the impression that -no one- thinks North Korea did it. I certainly don't, and that's in part because my government is so -focused- on getting us to believe they did.
And in part because the president is a democrat (pwned by Hollywood).
And in part because of what was hacked, what was released.
(another) data breach is embarrassing. An attack by NK garners sympathy. Also, without this hack The Interview would have made about a dollar.
No idea why 'North Korea did it' can possible be modded "Informative".
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Do you understand how impossible it is for your house to be robbed? Clearly you do not, you only have the one.
A better analogy would be "I have one tree that I have to monitor everyday. I know nobody is lurking in my tree because I can inspect it. You have an entire forest covering North America. How do you know there is no one lurking in that forest?"
North Korea is goddamn insane. I wouldn't be surprise if these connections don't allow SSL and have someone eyeball reading traffic that goes across each IP address and blocking it if they don't know what it is. Did you read the wikipedia article linked above? It's the government allocating these IP addresses to itself.
I just saw a documentary by PBS on North Korea. The only way they could get movies and music into North Korea was sneaker net across the border with China. Unreal.
Stupid logic is stupid.
I couldn't agree more.
You are correct in that it shouldn't need to be debated as it should outright be LEGAL. A "living leader" of any country is just a person; they are no different than any of us. Your only logical position would be to make it illegal to make a movie about assassinating any living person.
Everybody else? Hardly. Within the security community it is pretty hotly debated, and this latest revelation does not exactly help things.
Stop calling these self-promoting headline grabbers "security experts". They were wrong, and obviously so in a big way, even at the time. They two words "security expert" should never again be applied to these idiots who couldn't wait to call the FBI wrong. The Whitehouse had the resources of the USA including the NSA at their disposal. Anyone who thought their pet theory trumped that is by definition a "security moron".
What rock did you just crawl out from under?
Most are in agreement that North Korea did NOT do this.
I'm a Network Engineer. I have been in the I.T. field for 30 years and my specialty is information security. My Job is to break into networks, to make sure people can't break into networks. I'm a professional white hat hacker.
Part of my job is watching the hacking trends. I watch the forums, newsgroups, blogs, video channels, chat rooms, etc. etc. I do this to keep an eye out on the hackers to see if they are planning any cyber attacks on my customers. I also have been watching other cyber conflicts around the world, and Sony has been in a cyber war for nearly a dozen years. They have angered a lot of people.
Sony has a history of not treating their own employees very well, taking hostile acts against their customers, and this is usually a mixture for disgruntled employees.
Any large network would notice several terabytes going over the lines, and we are talking about a hundred times that. North Korea does not have the bandwidth for that, even if they can keep their electricity running, and they are not going to launch an attack on a stupid company over a stupid movie while Obama has been pointing fingers and threatening him for years.
In addition, I know at least 100 other people in my same field and our combined experience is well over 1200 years, and I am telling you, there is NO WAY North Korea was behind these attacks.
The FBI is full of it.
It's handy for departmental empire building, cheap politics and demands for funds if it's North Korea instead of the ordinary bunch of criminals that it appeared to be until long after the actual hacks happened. North Korea complaining about a movie about the killing of their high priest of a cult to his dead ancestors (that place is weird) is a given whether they were involved or not and is not evidence of any kind. I'm sure they would have loved to have done it, but it's very unlikely that they did
This information leaked by Clapper and Comey while not exactly a lie is misleading at best. Without the exact timeframe of the "got Sloppy" IP's it is not possible to determine if this is actually NK actioning an attack or GOP making it look like NK after the fact.
It all comes down to the fact that the NK / The Interview connection was not voiced by GOP until after the press had latched on to that link to point the finger at NK because of Sony pictures being the producer of The Interview. Now if the sloppy tradecraft (very unlikely) leaking a NK IP (175.45.176.0 – 175.45.179.255, 210.52.109.0 – 210.52.109.255 take your pick) prior to any mention of NK being responsible in the press then that would lend strong credence to that assertion. Otherwise it may point to GOP being unconnected with NK apart from PWNing either a machine within NK or via a BGP poisoning attack of a China Telecom router. Which neither China Telecom or NK are going to openly admit because of loosing face. Remember also that most of the machines in China & NK that run commercial OS's do so outside the ULA and are thus unable to keep patched and are thus open to being attacked by many known zero-day issues.
In the end it all comes down to this, governments are very bad at doing business and whoever GOP owes their allegiance or funding to, the attack on Sony was a covert criminal act conducted possibly across international boundaries and thus it needs to be treated as such. So If and when their is conclusive proof of someone who is responsible then legal recompense needs to be sought. Unfortunately international law and covert actions being what it is, it seems unlikely that even given the first the second will reach some resolution. FWIW this is a teachable moment for all large corporations, so start listening to their CISOs and give them the funds and manpower to properly secure their networks in the current climate.
we do actually, because the pirate bay spoofed their IPs to appear to come from North Korea as a prank a year or two ago.
TL;DR - They never had dealings in "Best" Korea, and it was a technical joke.
" there is NO WAY North Korea was behind these attacks."
Thanks Mr Anon. We'll all take your word on the subject even though it's based on having absolutely ZERO inside knowledge of ANYTHING related to this situation.
If you do not understand that every packet in and out of NK is logged then hand in your geek badge. If you do not understand that major efforts over the last few years have focused on being able to scrutinize all that traffic successfully then hand in your geek badge. If you do not understand that all activity including packet size packet count and timing information through NSA managed Tor nodes can be used to trace an attack especially one transferring such massive quantities of data making it impossible to hide even with obfuscation then hand in your geek badge, you truly are an idiot who slept through the Snowden revelations. They KNOW who conducted this attack and they will never tell you why for good reason. Some "security expert" claiming otherwise if no such thing, but you're always find some dummy looking for a headline.
Trivial.
Set up a really good firewall.
On one interface, install a porn server.
On the other interface, set up a LAN party of teenage boys.
Wait. It won't take the whole 5 years.
Log in or piss off.
Let's rephrase the question: what exactly would the US Government have to release to you in order to believe it was the DPRK that committed this hack?
Unedited video of Apollo 11 going to the moon where Neil Armstrong found a second gunman guarding Obama's birth certificate.
I've not seen anything that the government has released regarding this. I have heard speculation that this was North Korea, but haven't been shown any actual evidence. So to your questions answer: I'd need evidence. IP logs, exploits used written in proprer north korean grammar or something. Anything other than Comey and Clapper saying it was them the bad koreans ... they did it.
The trust of the intelligence community was proven to be broken repeatedly by the FBI/DOJ/FISA/NSA/CIA/IRS. Blind faith isn't an option any longer. Proof or it didn't happen.
eerily similar to the claims made by Cheney that there WMDs in Iraq. We're still looking for those.
You appear to have missed recent news reports stating that ISIS is using chemical weapons they obtained from storage locations in Iraq, where they had been put by the Saddam regime.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Right now there is a controversy going on in India. A top Muslim actor played the lead role in a movie that makes fun of Hindu godmen, has scenes where the prime Hindu deity Shiva gets chased down the streets of India, losing his clothes and ends up in underwear. Many Hindu organizations are outraged, but none of them have urged any of their followers to kill anyone. They petitioned the courts to ban the movie. India has a board of film censors, it approved the movie. The head of the board is a Catholic Christian. She has been quick in the past to ban movies that "hurt the sentiments of the Christian/Muslim communities and might endanger communal harmony". Courts have refused to ban the movie. And all the Hindu organizations are being lectured on tolerance, freedom of expression etc.
My problem with the West is that never find good things to encourage and praise. With all that caste, linguistic, religious divisions and abject poverty India is struggling to be a democracy, to uphold values of freedom of expression etc etc. Ostensibly West wants to promote these values. But most stories about India are about its problems.
In the face of Paris outrage, as part of denouncing terrorism, if they have shown a token respect for India/Hindus, that would send shock waves among the Muslim communities. "You attack us violently, we will show sympathy and support for your enemies, the Hindus" is an angle that might play well.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Even then, there's no reason to control what people should make movies about at all. There could be a reason to control what people do in the if they're filming in the United States. For example you can't be filming in the United States and commit actual crimes, like robbing a bank and then filming it in order for a movie.maybe you could open up yourself to problems by filming a movie about specific actual people who are not what they call persons of famous people. But these may be civil claims I see torts, rather then criminal claims.
Yup, definitely North Korea! There is no possibility that anyone could have setup a proxy account on some North Korean IPs.
Do you understand how impossible it is to get "a proxy account" into or out of North Korea? Clearly you do not. The have only one single block of IPv4 addresses.
Why would DPRK hackers be using the DPRK IPv4 address space when they are reportedly set up in China ? When I visited North Korea 6 months ago, the largest, most modern, and most prestigious hotel in the largest and most prestigious city (Pyongyang) was using dialup for internet access. To a Chinese ISP.
There are too many inconsistencies in the FBI's story. There are too many liars and too many suspects on all sides. Unless someone takes credit, there is no way to know who did the hacking.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
"Everybody else pretty much agrees North Korea did it"
You misspelled "Nobody but the FBI thinks North Korea did it"
Look, the FBI won't release ANY evidence. Meanwhile half a dozen bloggers who have looked at the data have pointed out that the preponderance of evidence shows that it was an insider. Like timestamps showing the data was copied at USB 2.0 speeds, for example. How are people missing this information? Are there really THAT many people living under proverbial rocks and posting on /. ?
Obligatory "you got lucky that a n00b modded you all the way up to 5" song and dance
(the Bush admin meant Uranium-fulled weapons like nukes)
If they had meant only nuclear weapons, they would have SAID nuclear weapons. They meant WMDs, including chemical weapons. The Bush Administration was condemned because they said Saddam had WMDs, and supposedly none were found when the U.S. invaded. Yet, now ISIS is reported to have WMDs they obtained from storage facilities in Iraq. Of course, all of this overlooks the fact that the primary reason which the Bush Administration gave for invading Iraq was that Saddam was egregiously violating almost every aspect of the agreement which ended Gulf War I.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Hackers don't "get sloppy" technologically. They have scripts to prevent that. They get sloppy in the real world.
Clearly you have never dealt with actual hackers. Every one I have ever seen has gotten sloppy at some stage, and that was with hackers up to Advance Persistent Threat level. Or did you mean any sloppiness was by the hacker and not by the script, including the hacker's sloppiness writing the script, so the ever-present sloppiness is in the real world? If that is what you meant then I agree. The scripts/programs always do exactly what they were programmed to do, even if that is not what the programmer intended.
What is more, 100 terabytes of company data is a lot to download. That didn't happen in a couple weeks. In fact, a fair amount of it might have been taken PHYSICALLY from Sony's servers.
Again... hack was in progress for more then a year.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
So, you realize that releasing information could give away the techniques used to gather said data. And, in doing so, allow those targeted to take steps to prevent such collection.
Now, if you don't believe these agencies should be collecting info from countries like DPRK, I can't help you. And, I'm not trying to defend anything regarding collection of metadata on non-military/citizens. But, if you acknowledge that intelligence gathering against enemies is an necessity, then you have to accept that some things simply can not be released.
Just another day in Paradise
For example you can't be filming in the United States and commit actual crimes, like robbing a bank and then filming it in order for a movie.
I think you are confused. Actually, filming a real bank robbery (even if you film it yourself) is perfectly fine. The mere act of filming your action (e.g., the bank robbery) does not make the crime legal, however. I doubt that such a film can even be excluded as evidence against you by self incrimination since the camera is not you (although it may be more difficult to establish a chain of custody). People get caught on "tape" by their own security cameras all the time and that is not problem as far as I know.
For the most part, there is no laws in the US to control what people should make movies about. The only filming that appears to be out of bounds today from a legal point of view is child pornography and sadly the laws against this do not stop it either...
Consider that the initial compromise might have required immense logistical resources that tends to be beyond those available to a teenage script kid. Like the hole might have to be found and penetrated by an adult with a computer science degree working all day, every day, for months. Criminal organizations have those resources applied to money-making efforts, but not for the 'lulz' of posting embarassing corporate emails online. Script kids are able to work on their attacks a few hours a day outside of school hours, etc.
It's wildly believable to me that North Korea could have hired outside talent to work on this and once the locks were broken, the data gathering was performed by less-skilled in-house technicians who might have been sloppy.
Don't forget, the member of lulzsec who brought that group down screwed up just once by connecting to IRC directly instead of through TOR and revealing his IP address.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Due to the Smith Mundt Act, the US government was forbidden from targeting its citizens with false propaganda. The propaganda had to at least be believable given what the government actually knows. In 2013 the Smith Mundt act was amended to remove the requirement for plausibility. In other words: It's open season for propagandists to lie to the public in order to better Manufacture Consent.
Given this recent blatant reduction in requirement for honesty combined with proof of prior actions of the FBI, and Snowden's revelations about GCHQ / NSA methods for manipulation of online discourse, I think it's safe to assume it could be any one of the US government agencies peddling the BS.
IMO, it looks like the USA is trying to keep up with Russia, et. al. on the propaganda front, and North Korea is going to be one of the the new prominent boogie men since their new leader might have his head screwed on tighter than his father.
If things like the French coup against fascists, and the recent #GamerGate scandal have shown us anything, it's that when you try to censor art it really gets the fans attention. From a statecraft standpoint the propaganda is executed quite well, however, from a technical standpoint it's utterly flawed in that we can see so much evidence that this was an inside job: From the ~5000 employees Sony recently laid off (including their entire digital division), hardcoded file paths in the attack code, the data transfer rate of the files at USB speeds, etc.
Thus, this seems like an organic co-opting, not a "grand" preconceived conspiracy. E.g., "Hey, how can we use this disgruntled Sony 'hacker' to our advantage? Well, it fits with our anti-NK propaganda, and the media thinks this might be retaliation, let's run with it by giving them more credence with a FBI report... Shit, most knowledgeable IT staff believed us, and they're telling their friends, what should we do? Put out another press release hinting at nebulous "proof" that it was NK? Scan the IP address logs, Sony's a big company it's got to have SOME traffic from there, right?"
Of course, as a rationalist I don't believe anything 100%, but this seems like the most reasonable explanation given the information at hand.
Clapper: “We could see that the IP addresses that were being used to post and to send e-mails were coming from IPs that were exclusively used by the North Koreans.”
Is he claiming that the NSA was watching the attack and data exfiltration while it was happening? Could they or should they have stopped it?
Sure, they get sloppy, but this just defies logic on every level.
What defies logic? Do you not believe North Korea has the ability or motivation to hack Sony as a result of this movie's production and imminent release (or for any other reason that regime may have given how much logic they appear to employ in their decisions)? Unless you believe the North Koreans were incapable of performing the hack, then there is no problem with logic, only that the evidence that you have personally seen doesn't meet what you demand in order to satisfy you of their likely guilt.
The real problem with your statement is this part:
It will take iron clad evidence with third party collaboration to convince most people this could possibly have been North Korea.
First, note your telling use of the word "possibly", not even the word "probably".
Unless you had a bunch of surveillance cameras watching every move as a hack was done, and probably not even then, "iron clad evidence" doesn't exist in this virtual world of the Internet. No matter what evidence is collected, someone will say it could have been faked, misinterpreted, or lied about, and technically they are right. This means the standards you say most people will demand in order to believe North Korea was the driving force behind this are not obtainable, even if North Korea is guilty. Of course the same holds true for evidence in any crime, which is why in the US the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt, not as I have heard many say, beyond a shadow of a doubt. The first is obtainable, the second isn't, after all, for any given crime, prove that advanced space aliens didn't do it and create all the evidence to implicate the accused, including planting false memories? At some point the evidence is convincing and you believe the implicated party is guilty, at least for those who don't have a need to believe otherwise. If all you see is conspiracy theories, then that is the lens you will use to interpret everything, and bend the interpretation to what you desire the reality to be.
These days it's not an unreasonable assumption that the NSA intercepts, collects, and stores every frame of IP data routed through any publicly addressable router on planet Earth. I don't think it would really be giving anything away to disclose some packet logs.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
In all fairness, the ability to access the data isn't necessarily the same as knowing what to look for. If I tell the world how I caught you breaking into my network, you also potentially know where you screwed up so you can avoid making the same mistake in the future. That's not to say they shouldn't tell us why, or provide enough reasonable evidence without tipping their entire hand. In some ways it mirrors other problems of disclosure in the network security realm. The hackers read the same stuff we do. That doesn't mean you never disclose, you just don't do so unthinkingly.
I do hope they cough up more information though. I'm curious to know why he's so confident, since high confidence attribution is normally very difficult from a given breach/incident.
1. North Korea managed to develop an acceptable army of hackers on their own in 5 years. (No internet in 2009, supposedly)
The same way the VPAF (North Vietnam) went from no air force in 1959 to a combat capable air force flying Russian jet fighters in 1964... They sent their pilots to be trained in the Soviet Union.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.