Just WHY is the FBI so sure North Korea hacked Sony? NSA: *BLUSH*

We know they lie

We're just finally at the point in the "cry wolf" story when the villagers don't believe it when there might actually be a wolf.

I don't suppose they'll get the aesop though.

Curious timing

As always, politicians in general and the US of A in particular, start out with a lie, and if it doesn't convince Joe Public, they come up with another lie. And then months later, if the doubters are still numerous and loud, come up with that damning piece of "evidence" to silence them all... (of course, that's another lie).

If what they say was credible, surely they'd have mentioned it much earlier (especially since they claim to have been in NK's networks since 2010). The timing just stinks.

And the pattern repeats: WMD, Snowden, Torture (or, sorry, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques)...

Lie after lie after lie... because the first lie just wasn't convincing enough, the second didn't quite do the trick either... and on and on it goes...

Come on chaps, think like a spook. You have an actor who you can't crack. What do you do? You persuade them that their current system is broken so they will change it.

The organized chaos of a changeover would be the ideal time to compromise a system.

Would have been more impressive (and believable)

if they had stopped the hack.

So no new evidence then. The 'key evidence' that I've seen is a list of proxy IP addresses; all of which were published. So it could have been absolutely anyone. They might claim that using a particular bunch of IP addresses as a suite would 'fingerprint' the aggressors; but it reality it could still have been anyone...the suite of IP addresses being used by random chance or someone looking to frame the norks is at least as likely.

So this latest 'evidence' is a hearsay claim that the NSA had pwned the norks years earlier. On the face of it, this is reasonable, as eavesdropping on nuke-armed nutters is more or less what the NSA is for. Given a network as small as the norks I would suppose that they might well be able to point out the building the signals emanated from. But that's supposition and -given the evidence and effectiveness displayed- there is no reason to believe that the NSA could find the norks on a map, with 3 tries and a geographer standing by.

So with all the grillion$ of dollars to throw at things; laws bent; and lots of staff the NSA can only be wise in hindsight? Well shit, as a commentard I can be wise in hindsight for free, and nobody has to get their liberties fucked over in the process.

If they were monitoring, they failed. If they weren't monitoring they failed. Nobody believes a syllable they say anyway...for such a high-falutin' think tank; they don't seem to realise just how much of a hit their credibility has taken. Saying "it's OK, the NSA had it under control, but it's all operational so we can't tell you about it" just ain't good enough.

Trust?

"All this is mostly based on anonymous briefings by shadowy intelligence types."

and we should believe that because...?

If you REALLY want to know what the NSA is up to then as a shadowy intelligence type (honest!) I'll happily give you an anonymous briefing - for the usual brown envelope full of swiss francs left in a hollow oak tree in Hyde Park.

Constructions such as this.

Should have some foundation, structure and supporting evidence to hold up.

Otherwise they are just Building 7's

Conspiracy theory

...for that matter, how do we know it wasn't the NSA themselves? Encryption makes their jobs harder (my heart fucking bleeds). So how better to address that than a high-profile hack (giving an excuse to crack down on the technically literate) followed by an inexpensive atrocity (to get the public in an accepting mood to have their civil liberties dry-arse-fucked yet again)?

Blaming the norks is perfect because they can be guaranteed to spout enough mixed threats and denials to keep it all in the papers for weeks. And when that all starts to fade a bit, cue the atrocity...

EDIT: Ha! PNGuinn, you beat me to it.

Look, look, here's an example of how the NSA is fighting the bad guys! Everyone knows North Korea are the bad guys, right? That makes us the good guys!

"our shared goal is to prevent bad actors from exploiting, disrupting or damaging U.S. commercial networks and cyber infrastructure. When it becomes clear that cyber criminals have the ability and intent to do damage, we work cooperatively to defend networks."

When we hacked into their networks, we found that these terrible criminals were hacking into our networks!!!!!!!!!!!!

Four possibilities

There are four possibilities here. The cross product of:

NSA has broken/not broken the NK's net.

The NKs hacked/didn't hack Sony.

The North Koreans know if they hacked Sony or not. If they did, and the NSA have let it be known that they watched them, there is no real news.

The only really interesting possibility is that the North Koreans didn't hack Sony, and the NSA are saying that they have cracked the North Korean's network, and saw them do it. Clearly the North Koreans should conclude that the NSA are lying, and the NSA has not cracked their network. Or maybe they are bluffing...

Maybe the NSA has cracked the network, and knows the North Koreans didn't hack Sony... Maybe the North Koreans did hack Sony but the NSA are lying about knowing....

Sending mutually contradictory information to the enemy intelligence agencies is just what traditional intelligence work is about. Keeping their heads in a spin, and obfuscating any real intel that they have with noise is exactly what it is about.

Why the US intel community would disclose source and methods just to bolster credibility.

>" If not, why is the US intel community disclosing source and methods just to bolster the credibility of its explanation for the Sony hack?"

Well, Bruce Schneier has a plausible theory that would explain that: from https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/01/attack_attribut.html -

What this all means is that it's in the US's best interest to claim omniscient powers of attribution. More than anything else, those in charge want to signal to other countries that they cannot get away with attacking the US: If they try something, we will know. And we will retaliate, swiftly and effectively. This is also why the US has been cagey about whether it caused North Korea's Internet outage in late December.