New Study Adds to Skepticism Among Experts That North Korea Was Behind Sony Hack

Re:New Study Adds to Skepticism Among Experts That North Kor... by ceejayoz on Friday December 26, 2014 @09:53AM (#8798956)

> Combine that with the fact that North Korea has a terrible education system and an entimated 1 in 10,000 people have access to the Internet in North Korea. This is not the kind of environment that fosters elite super hackers. I don't think NK did it.

You could say the same for nuclear programs and rockets. People showing technical aptitude are likely singled out for special training and given perks unheard of by the general population.

Plus, from what we've heard, the Sony hack didn't require remarkable levels of skill. They were doing things like storing major account passwords in text/Excel files on a shared drive.

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Re:New Study Adds to Skepticism Among Experts That North Kor... by XorNot on Friday December 26, 2014 @10:40AM (#8799074)

The only problem being that there's a much larger population of more skilled people who would do it "for the lulz" everywhere else in the world.

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Re:New Study Adds to Skepticism Among Experts That North Kor... by ceejayoz on Friday December 26, 2014 @10:41AM (#8799075)

I'm dubious that North Korea did this particular attack.

That said, acting as if North Korea can't pull off this sort of attack is dangerously complacent.

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Re:New Study Adds to Skepticism Among Experts That North Kor... by XorNot on Friday December 26, 2014 @10:54AM (#8799114)

The thing is no one should care. It isn't unique NK capability. Hacking is the domain of non-state actors, and knows no real political boundaries - at least on this level.

We're not talking about stuxnet, where it's likely wetwork teams planted it in the targets. We're talking about a run of the mill corporation with bad security getting owned - it was going to happen because the bar to clear for doing it just wasn't very high.

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