North Korea not responsible for Sony Hack
Kurt Stammberger, Senior Vice President for Norse Corp, told the US CBS Evening News why he believed North Korea was not behind the massive Sony breach, but was instead most likely orchestrated by a former employee.
“Sony was not just hacked, this is a company that was essentially nuked from the inside,” cybersecurity firm Norse’s senior vice president Kurt Stammberger told CBS. ”We are very confident that this was not an attack master-minded by North Korea and that insiders were key to the implementation of one of the most devastating attacks in history.”
The FBI formally accused Pyongyang of taking a central role in the attack based on the virus’ coding and the use of a global network of computers, both of which were employed in attacks against South Korea in the last two years. The FBI claims to have previously tied North Korea to those attacks, and in conjunction with other information the bureau declined to elaborate on due to the ongoing investigation, declared Pyongyang “responsible” for the hack.
Norse describes itself as “the global leader in live attack intelligence, building solutions that help organizations detect, mitigate and prevent network incursions from darknets while preventing future security failures. The patented Norse DarkMatter platform is a globally-distributed “distant early warning” network of thousands of sensors, honeypots, and crawlers that continuously analyzes Internet traffic to identify compromised hosts, malicious botnets, anonymous proxies, and other sources of digital attack. Processing hundreds of terabytes daily, the DarkMatter™ attack intelligence platform continuously computes over 1,500 distinct risk factors for millions of IP addresses every day”.
The supposed reason for the hack was the release of the film “The Interview” where the characters Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his producer Aaron Rapoport (Seth Rogen) are the team behind the popular tabloid-TV show “Skylark Tonight.” After learning that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (Randall Park) is a huge fan of the show, they successfully set up an interview with him, hoping to legitimize themselves as actual journalists. However, as Dave and Aaron prepare for their journey to Pyongyang, the CIA steps in, recruits them, and assigns them an incredible mission: Assassinate the dictator. Since its more limited release it has had mixed reviews.
Kim Jong Un apparently incensed by the movies impending release got his state machinery to hack and embarrass Sony and he then denied any involvement?
North Korean authorities expressed extreme criticism of the movie stating. “The act of making and screening such a movie that portrays an attack on our top leadership … is a most wanton act of terror and act of war, and is absolutely intolerable,” they added, “If the U.S. government condones the screening of the film, they will have their consequences.” The rep also called the makers of the film “gangster-like scoundrels.”
Obama’s response criticised Sony for pulling the launch of the film and said “We cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like, or news reports that they don’t like”
What ever the truth, the not many movies released in 2014 can boast pre release comments from Kim Jong Un of North Korea and President Obama in one week.
