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NSA Hack of N. Korea Convinced Obama NK Was Behind Sony Hack
Mike Lape links to a NYTimes piece which says "The evidence gathered by the 'early warning radar' of software painstakingly hidden to monitor North Korea's activities proved critical in persuading President Obama to accuse the government of Kim Jong-un of ordering the Sony attack, according to the officials and experts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the classified N.S.A. operation." From the linked article:
For about a decade, the United States has implanted “beacons,” which can map a computer network, along with surveillance software and occasionally even destructive malware in the computer systems of foreign adversaries. The government spends billions of dollars on the technology, which was crucial to the American and Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear program, and documents previously disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, the former security agency contractor, demonstrated how widely they have been deployed against China. ... The extensive American penetration of the North Korean system also raises questions about why the United States was not able to alert Sony as the attacks took shape last fall, even though the North had warned, as early as June, that the release of the movie “The Interview,” a crude comedy about a C.I.A. plot to assassinate the North’s leader, would be “an act of war.”
So, the US says North Korea attacked Sony. And the US knows this because it attacked North Korea years ago ...
Don't you think?
Thank god people know now that the threat is North Korea hacking a movie company. This way, they can be freedom fighters just by watching a mildly funny movie with Mr. Rogen and Mr. Franco, which is both fun and easy.
Otherwise, they would have to assume that the threat to their freedom is more like a court approving a single warrant on the telecomm data of more than a million people. Or the CIA spying on the institution that is supposed to supervise them. Fighting these would be much less fun and easy, maybe even dangerous.
I wonder what Powell thinks of the evidence?
There's nothing they could do or say that would convince the Slashdot crowd that it really was North Korea behind the attack. North Korea could reveal exactly how it did it and Slashdot would still tinfoil hat this into a conspiracy.
...
Cue the "false flags" bullshit comments or talk about how one of the DPRK's 1024 IP addresses was hacked by someone else to use as an attack vector from the United States. This whole readership should really just cough up its computer networks card right about now
1. This is another "45 minute" claim of the sort that provided pretext for the Iraq war, isn't it? It might be true, or it might be misleading but have an element of truth, or it might be utter fiction. An intelligence agency is an agency of state security, and "state security" means working on behalf of state interests, and state interests tend not to coincide with the people's interests.
2. It might then be in the interests of the state to let the attack happen, so it can be used as an excuse to further state interests.
3. I don't know why people are getting their panties twisted about NK's typically sabre-rattling reaction, which we all know is 1 part "I'm a maniacal dictator" and 1 part "goad the Americans into reacting so we can use their reaction as internal propaganda proving them to be an on-going threat that necessitates our regime". How would the West feel about the release of a popular film in which the assassination of a living head of state is planned? How would your government behave toward you if YOU wrote a book / published a film / performed a play about this?
Ask yourself first whether it has ANY importance whatsoever whether it was or was not NK which hacked Sony site, when your own government, together with the help of your "don't be evil" company, watches every move of yours and every site you wish to see, and feeds you with lies and propaganda via the 6 media megacorporations which own 90% of US media, and hacks and spies ALL its satellite states in Europe (I live in one of these states).
teh NSA is convinced unnamed bogeymen exist nao
So they have a secret capability to spy on North Korea, and they tell us because Sony got hacked? So now North Korea knows about it and probably will do something about it? That sounds an incredibly stupid action to me.
In WWII, when the Brits cracked German encryption, the went to incredible lengths to create believable stories how they found secret German operations that they discovered through decrypted Enigma messages.
NK Barely have electricity. Why would they attack a subsidiary of a "Japanese" (multinational) company because murca hacked NK's 8 computers?
Give me whatever he is having.
NSA sees hack happening because it's spying on everyone including NK, fails to notify anyone, fails to take preventative action, seems to me like the 'S stands for Security' does not mean what we think it means, or at least has no relevance to anyone outside the upper echelons of the security services. Did any of this actually matter to anyone outside of those circles?
This isn't even about convincing the American public to support the NSA. It's about giving politicians talking points to justify the support they intend to continue to give.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
We can't show you the evidence, 'cause we gots to keep it secret how we got it. Fuck off, you liars.
Surely the most obvious answer is that this is an NSA hack, and they threw the blame at North Korea, because a) Snowden leak yesterday reveals NSA does these false flag ops. b) NSA is defending its mass surveillance charges so it needs a scapegoat right now. c) Sony is a TV company and thus good for marketing to have them on your side.
http://boingboing.net/2015/01/18/ecstatic-nsa-spooks-delight-in.html
"... they routinely seek to cover their tracks or to lay fake ones instead. In technical terms, the ROC lays false tracks as follows: After third-party computers are infiltrated, the process of exfiltration can begin -- the act of exporting the data that has been gleaned. But the loot isn't delivered directly to ROC's IP address. Rather, it is routed to a so-called Scapegoat Target. That means that stolen information could end up on someone else's servers, making it look as though they were the perpetrators. "
even by American standards. Let N.K know that you're in their systems, just so you can convince us N.K were behind Sony attacks? Wow. Everyone understands N.K did NOT hack Sony, and in fact, the U.S is more likely to have done it themselves, just like they fuels conflict everywhere else they can. The U.S has become a divider, and the world needs to wake up, and stand up to them.
See Subject.
I will never believe anything a US government ever says, because they showed in the past that they can not be trusted and that this does not change with whatever party is in charge right now. It is just lies that come out of every official PR persons mouth. Without hard facts to back it up everything they say must be considered not true.
Snowden is going to die squealing and grunting like a wild boar, and it'll be the FSB that does it. The coroner will be fascinated by how huge and round his eyes are.
The clock is ticking, Eddie. :) Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock.
NSA is domestic spy operation, not an international one. NSA is forbidden by law from engaging in operations outside the US border.
All intelligence and security operations outside the US boarder, by law, are carried out by the CIA.
We're just being told that this was an NSA thing, but in reality it was a CIA thing.
This is terribly irresponsible regardless of the validity of it. South Korea has been attempting to reduce tensions in the area to return to negotiations with the North. This could be considered as evidence of hostilities by the South and increase tensions in the area. This would have a negative effect on the talks, increase the resolve in the North and add legitimacy to Japan's quest to reestablish a military. Destabilizing an entire region of the world and putting millions of lives at risk, reducing the effectiveness of your and your allies' cyber divisions, just to add weight to your PR campaign is nothing but irresponsible.
This smells funny. No ha-ha funny, but stinky-funny. Just like the WMD campaign before Iraq did, back in it's time.
If you look carefully, you will get hints of:
* people covering their assess for not seeing it coming
* people manoeuvring to further their own goals and political positions
* people pretending *they* are in control
* people pretending *someone* is in control
It may be even be some people using the noise to cover other stuff.
All in all, Intelligence (we should stop using that word, really) business as usual.
Can't the Americans inject packets into major Internet hubs anywhere in the world in order to make it look like packets came from somewhere? Can't they make it look like North Korea did the hacking if they wanted to?
The world fights wars over images and expressions. This proves that we are collectively as stupid as the war fighting fictional nobility of the past.
Sony: Help! We've been hacked! .....
USG: Those DPRK rascals must be held responsible!
Public: It could have been someone else....
USG: No way! We saw their IPs sending e-mail to Sony!
Public: But anyone could have relayed e-mail through an insecure server....
Sony: Help, somebody........
USG: No, definitely them! We've been hacking them for years! We know!
Public: So why didn't you warn Sony before they were hacked?
USG:
The lesson here is that sometimes it's better to say nothing than to open the floodgates of public scrutiny. There is no winning outcome for the government at this point.
Snowden warns us that we're being spied on and that the grip the NSA has on the whole Internet goes far beyond what even the most paranoid had imagined and the US government answer is: espionage prosecution, international warrant etc.
Compare with: Unnamed NSA official, no doubt with the blessing of his bosses, anonymously reveals the same kind of information about NSA spying - but this time because it is convenient for the administration and it fits into their political agenda, there won't be any legal consequences, prosecutions etc., absolutely nothing will happen, we all know it - and even worse - we all passively accept it.
Laws are being selectively enforced by the government; there are no actually classified documents. There are "things the government wants you to know", those can be leaked and released on demand by "unnamed officials" - screw the legality of it - and there are "things the government doesn't want you to know", and anyone revealing those things will be spied on, harassed and prosecuted (James Risen? Laura Poitras?), it doesn’t matter that the people writing about those are journalists who have no duty of any kind towards the US government, they’re just doing their job.
If the administration has proof of North Korean involvement, they can present it to try to convince the American public... but wait, no they can’t. They can't do that because the evidence they have comes from the NSA exploiting and hacking systems all over the internet. "Yes, your honor, I saw it all, it was the North Koreans who painted that graffiti. How do I know? I was there that night, burying a few bodies in the empty lot next door".
The NSA giving actual proof of NK involvement is equivalent to them coming forward and admitting what they are: a threat far more dangerous for the security of the Internet than anything North Korea will ever be capable of.
Considering that systemd pid 0 is a binary blob init system, there's no telling what kind of malicious crap Pottering could push out in a binary and it could be weeks, months or even years before the FOSS community catches it in the source with the track record it has with catching major (however obfuscated) bugs lately (heartbleed? shellshock?). Your statement is offtopic in the scope of the discussion, but not outside of the realm of what is probable with binary inits. Hell, for all we know the NSA could be the driving force behind all the distros suddenly having their philosophies cave to the worship of systemd; just so they'd have a way to introduce a back door inside of system initialization. You have to admit, for an organization as Conservative and Cautious as Debian, for them to suddenly lurch everything they have in the direction of a mainly untested release of a brand new init system that no one really knows anything about at its core (save its core developers) should be raising more eyebrows than it is.
Why is the USA helping out the Japanese so much?
admits to hacking NK first which they say can be considered an act of war just to let the world know NK commited a possible act of war? WTF?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Usually when you hack a network, you hack an internal router so you can make the server logs think it's coming from somewhere else.
We need to limit our actions to those which:
- increase security
- improve communications and transparency
- improve access
Monitoring communications has to come after that --- the whole point to a society is to maintain and increase human dignity --- any action by a government which doesn't do this is an absolute travesty and should be prosecuted as a criminal act.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Because the NSA has always been open and honest with its paymasters, the American people, it is completely trustworthy in this as in all things.
Hey, 3.5 stripes, unless that is your real name, you are merely hiding behind a pseudonym, which makes you no less anonymous than I.
When are you people going to get that through your thick, fucking heads?
According to John McAfee, N. Korea had nothing to do with the Sony hack.
John McAfee says a lot of things and does a lot of things that seem pretty 'remarkable'. Either he is having one hell of a interesting life, or he is a pathological liar. It seems pretty convenient that he cannot even give this mystery group a name.
North Korea has a well established history of aggressive, belligerent behavior, and this sort of thing sounds right up their alley. John is going have to cough up a lot more evidence than his good word that an agency with thousands of people and billions of dollars in hardware devoted keeping an eye on a rouge nation is wrong.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Thank god Snowden has told the world of about how the US gathers cyber intelligence. They spend years putting this network together behind enemy lines to collect useful information and one idiot brings the the entire thing down. I feel so much safer now. /s
that the US government should never ever be trusted.
Spying on another country does not constitute an attack; bringing down its systems would be an attack. Like bringing down a company's computer systems would be an attack. (Spying on US companies by network infiltration has been going on for decades, including defense contractors; to my knowledge, while that spying was frowned on, it hasn't been labeled an attack.)
It's also the case that North Korea is technically still at war with South Korea, which is an ally of ours. And it has attacked boats in international waters. And it has nukes, which it has threatened to use on other countries, including Japan (another US ally) and the US. And it has rockets capable of achieving orbit, which could in principle be used to deliver those nukes. I don't say that any of these are plausible imminent threats, but it would be foolish of the US not to use all means it can--short of attacks--to keep track of the reality behind the threats.
Whereas Sony is an entertainment company.
Whereas it is ok for us to arrest people planning to blow up buildings 30 years from now, we can't do anything about North Korea until weeks after they did something, even if we knew -- because they are innocent until proven guilty.
Most people are not sane and not to be trusted.
Have you driven anywhere?
Worked for anyone?
Do you know how many people believe in imaginary sky daddies?
Have you read the recent research about eyewitness testimony?
Veracity of government employees under oath, in court or not?
Heard of this guy called Snowden and his revelations?
And yes, drug use, including alcohol, does make people less trustworthy, because overall it adversely affects that most marvelous evolved machine - the human brain, and thus the mind.
Just say no.
Nothing the NYT links to says the NSA used the system to give early warning of Sony (or even after-the-fact analysis of Sony) - It simply says that the NSA had extensively penetrated NK in the late 2000's, and if that system were still in place, *could* have gained insight into the attack, either before it happened, or after the fact. However, given the FBI have raw access into the NSA's databases, its possible that this is why the FBI won't back up its claims with actual facts - it is relying on the database that the NSA have that is in breach of a LOT of laws, and use of which usually is subject to "parallel construction".
-=DaveHowe=-
I don't understand why would the NSA so willingly disclose all of this information and reveal it's cards, admit it's failure to protect SONY, admit to espionage on several foreign countries, implicate another friendly foreign country and generally heat up the international ring so much.
What are the tactical-strategical benefits of such peculiar moves?
They make Snowden's revelations so unnecessary and aggressive when they so willingly and openly come out with all this information now!
Was it due to overwhelming public demand so concerned about that forgettable film and... what was it... censorship? that thing that runs amok on Youtube?
Honestly I don't know what to think of it.
...so the saying goes.