Forget Norks, Russian hackers are in Sony Pictures' servers – claim There's a new twist in the already tangled tale of the Sony Pictures mega-hack: it's now claimed Russians possibly broke into the company's computers. Miscreants in the Putin-led nation comprehensively compromised the Hollywood studio's servers, and were responsible for most of the damage against its systems, reckons Jeffrey …
Whom to believe the various FBI & NSA bods that have came forward and insisted if we could see the intelligence they have access to showing its the Nork's, or the random hacker spouting shite on the internet saying the Russians are coming the Russians are coming?
In my opinion its the random Russian/Ukrainian guy on the net, not because its more likely just at this point we have to assume he/she is more plausible than any US Gov mouthpiece.
... except that a Russian angle cannot suit them better than blaming the Norks, as all the mainstream media, the BBC and the NY, etc. are all still reporting it was the Norks days after this story on el Reg. After all, only the Norks and Diesh are skilled enough to do this kind of advanced hacking.
Now that the US is gearing up to send small arms and Javelin missiles to our Wolfsangel-decorated newfound but discombobulated ukrainian friends to counter "russian agression", the Sony hack MUST ACTUALLY HAVE BEEN PUTIN!
Holy damn, there are not enough random events to hang onto Norks, Putin, Iranians, ISIS, Chinese, Ghaddafi types, whistleblowers and other enemies-du-jour.
WHAT DO! !
Well, the CIA is pretty good in false flag operations and Radio Gleiwitz-like events. Have at it!
The answer is obvious:
* NORK hacked Sony
* CIA/NSA hacked NORK
* FSB hacked CIA/NSA
It's called data sharing. The only other alternative is that all of the above outsource their hacking to the same contractor. A contractor who will bill three clients for the same job? Centrica - where are you when we need you ;-)
Let's see... some rogue group (GOP), the NORK's, and now the Russians? Who gets blame next? China? Iran? Syria? or a country that someone high feels like blaming?
The part that bothers me here as to the factuality of this is that the guy is Ukrainian (allegedly) and might be just be tossing red herrings about.
I've never understood the soapbox shouted logic of "X has a previously unreleased file from the hack of Y therefore they must have been involved", it simply doesn't make any sense. That you have a previously unreleased file proves that you simply have possession of a previously (publicly) unreleased file, not how you came to have it.
Could you own (legally or via hacking) a machine that was used in the exfiltration?
Could you have gotten it from a friend of a friend of....someone loosely connected to the hacker that is a total braggard and wants to big-up themselves?
There are many possibilities.
There is no even slightly sensible way to do attribution. Sure you can find out the country an IP-address is hosted at and you can find out who pays for it. This doesn't mean they are the culprit. Sure you can compile your software on a machine with Chinese locales set, but that doesn't mean you are Chinese. (apparently most laptops in North Korea run pirated Chinese Windows XP)
Those are all things that can even be done by a disgruntled employee, let alone some larger organisation which can put in a couple of man weeks into disguising their identity.
So it's unlikely we will ever find out what exactly happened there.
"Sure you can find out the country an IP-address is hosted at and you can find out who pays for it. This doesn't mean they are the culprit."
But it's convenient to blame China for hacking when they're mainly guilty of having a shitload of civilian-owned poorly secured computers (mainly a consequence of using pirated copies of windows)
Hacking crews are multinational. Whilst I have my doubts about the Norks being involved in the Sony breakin, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the rest of the theories are _all_ true (disgruntled ex-employees, hacking groups comprising various nationalities, etc. FWIW the most sucessful ones tended to come from Ukraine, Romania and Israel, whilst the most vindictive tended to be american)
As others have pointed out, this wouldn't have happened if Sony hadn't been lax with their security in the first place.
So the feds say that NK did the hacking to try and stop the release of that movie about their glorious leader (I can't remember it's name and I frankly do not care).
That being the case, why then did they distribute the very movie they were trying to stop all over torrent sites for people see it anyway? Which would presumably lead to their unpleasant executions?
A curious thing for them to do....... or rather it would be a curious thing for them to do if they were actually NKs. Or are the feds perhaps tweaking evidence again à la Iraq war documents?
...when someone pointed out his glaring mistake about his previous accusation that the Norks had hacked and pulled off over 100TB of data ( a feat that would have taken years at todays fastest rates)
Especially since NK are a third world country and not exactly renowned for being a known area for Hackers.
So now to save his ass they are trying to pin it on Russia instead.
Hmmmm....
I pointed that out at the time, but no one listened.
At the total bandwidth available to NK at the time, it would have taken over 3 months continuous to pull the first load of released data. Seems unlikely, to say the least. And then it's revealed that they stole terabytes more! It's just not physically possible.
T'was the Norks!
Nay, t'was the Russkies!
Bollocks - it was SONY leaving stable doors open.
This idea of pointing the finger at those who went in to Sony is shite. Sony created the problem - and, considering its model is now based on getting subs on servers they ought to be well and truly spanked.
But, it's far, far eaiser to point to the playground and say 'Big boys came and took my pocket money'.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
