The public /22 (1024 IPs) that is used by North Korea is widely known now, so it is bad form to assume the US is behind this attack. Heck, a 14 year old with a few bots could take down their whole country.
This outage won't hurt North Korea. At best it makes for a good head line to see the whole country offline. At worst this means that their elite citizens cannot access social networks or email outside of their country.
I really hope this isn't the doing's of the US government. You'd hope they could do better than this..
It may not have been an intentionally initiated plan either. Say NK starts getting suspicious traffic, one possible response is to just pull the plug. I doubt that there are a lot of non-state users to worry about - and if an enemy of the state is blamed ... oh well.
Or it could be an actual false flag operation by the US to instigate something.... Something is very weird about their attitude towards north korea regarding this break in.
a film with a second-rate comedic actor about North Korea, which in the United States on its own being released normally, would draw precisely no one
the only proof it has on North Korea’s involvement in the hacking, is “that the FBI said so,” apart from claims by the “Sony Pictures’ PR department.”
Sony was domiciled in Japan, specifically in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. And so it’s a Japanese multi-national corporation not an American one. And one would think that some sort of an offence by a state actor or anyone else against the Japanese corporation would be a concern for the Japanese government, and not the United States government,”
The North Korean government insisted on Saturday that it was not behind the hacking and proposed a joint investigation with the US to prove it had no involvement in the cyber attacks
outraged by the film showing the assassination of leader Kim Jong Un - also claimed to have 'clear evidence' that the U.S. government engineered the project as a 'propaganda' attack against North Korea.
the North Korean government is also convinced that directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were under direct instruction from U.S. officials, who told them to include extra scenes to 'insult the dignity' of North Korea
a group calling themselves the Guardians of Peace has claimed credit.
Guardians of Peace responded to the FBI with a message on Saturday, mocking their investigation and trolling them with a video that essentially called them idiots.
Most likely it's some 14 year old with a small bot network. Or they decided to unplug their router for a week or two to have a bit of a Christmas break from the hassle of maintaining it, since it doesn't harm them in any way.
edit: I do not mean that what the person who created that website is a 14 year old as it is a very thorough analysis. Just that with this type of information on the internet it is probably pretty easy to construct a bunch of bots to take out the country's connections to the outside world.
I'd really like to know how the U.S. "knows" North Korea is responsible for the attack on Sony and if there's any credible link from U.S. government to this attack of North Korea.
Goodness. It could be the same organization behind both. Instigation.
FWIW the CERT ('US Computer Emergency Readiness Team') report on the 19th [1] delves a bit deeper into the exploit methods.
If you search for the MD5 hashes of the code you can find code snippets and incidents where such code was used in the past (hacking attempts at DHS, etc). Even though none of these were '0-days' or written by those with ties to NK, the attribution seems to be based on such code reuse.
When talking about the Iraq dossier there were proven falsehoods.
"Without exception, all of the allegations included within the September Dossier have been since proven to be false, as shown by the Iraq Survey Group."
Compared to the very real, physical threat to South Korea, the fate of a movie company is small potatoes to the U.S. government.
What the U.S. needs most from North Korea is information; they're not going to burn exploits and vulnerabilities for a simple DDOS. If anything, they want North Korea to be more online, where it's easier for the NSA to collect information.
What we could be seeing could be a very small part of a much larger operation. We could have bricked or infected their entire infrastructure (quite literally), and then DDoS'd it off the internet to:
1. Give the world a visible sign of response.
2. Perhaps trick the DPRK into believing this was the USA et al.'s real move.
If they are running Cisco up front I wonder it's possible their network was brought down by a zero-day exploit that only uncle sam knows about? (vs. a more mundate DDoS?)
I hope so too, and I doubt the US government's response will be cyber-warfare related. There's not much they can do in the first place, and it would be a petty tit-for-tat reprimand.
This is occurring after the hacker group who claimed the attack (Guardians of Peace), sent the FBI a letter thanking them for blaming North Korea, calling the FBI the best (sic), and linked to a youtube video that called the FBI "an idiot".[1]
Did anyone else hear "America, fuck yeah!" after the last paragraph of that CNN article?
"Yes, let's go out and get all the republicans (the unintentional irony of the GOP supporting the movie notwithstanding) to buy tickets to see this movie to show those foreigners that when terrorists try to scare us, we just buy a bunch of useless shit."
Perhaps one of the dumbest things I've heard in response to this situation yet.
Sorry - I know I'm fairly new as a commenter (long time listener, nearly-first time caller!), and my karma may take a nosedive for this one. I just couldn't hold this one inside.
Iggy Azalea has hired a crack team of cybermercenaries to take down NK. As communication between different groups calling themselves Anonymous can be quite poor, she hopes to create enough disarray and confusion among the script kiddies to divert and ultimately sublimate the energy and attention currently focused on her.
What is it with old people and their complete inability to understand Anonymous? If you did that, you wouldn't be acting like "them", you would be part of Anonymous.
That's the entire point. Anyone attributing an action to "them" inherently wrong in doing so.
"Because Anonymous has no leadership, no action can be attributed to the membership as a whole. Parmy Olson and others have criticized media coverage that presents the group as well-organized or homogeneous." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28group%29)
No, not really. I said it for the same reason racists might use your example. To demean that group and to prime people who don't identify with that group to look down on the behavior.
the thing I don't get is it's literally in their name, that this is not a group but just some random people on the internet. The idea that it's one group just comes from how 4chan talks about anonymous people with slight lingo, making it sound like a group from an outsider.
If you want to be specific about what most of the internet refers to as 'Anonymous', it is /b/ on 4chan. /b/ and their very odd lingo is relatively well organized, but anonymous amongst eachother. Collectively, they are what the majority of people refer to as the 'hacker collective anonymous'. They also refer to themselves as btards look it up on urbandictionary or (NSFW) encyclopedia dramatica to learn more.
Just because some people posing as anonymous rejected the hypothesis it doesn't mean no other people posing as anonymous still accept it.
Also, you seem to ignore the fact that many people posing as anonymous would take part in an action like that regardless of what they believe. Anonymous has always been more about "doing it for the lulz" than politics, even if the ones posing as "doing it for the politics" are overrepresented in the medias.
he's down voted but not too far off base. The US has already used hacker organizations to inadvertently act in the interests of the US government. Considering that the US almost certainly has moles in Anonymous, it wouldn't be hard to influence them to target Korea
You're over-complicating the issue, I think. Why not just do it themselves, then claim it was 'Anonymous'? No convincing required and no one to argue with.
The whole thing smells like just another move to convince the non-believers into thinking NK was responsible for the Sony hack.
Both the US FBI (via, for example, their mole sabu) and the UK (via GCHQ's JTRIG) have previously conducted offensive operations under the cover of Anons. (Of course that doesn't make a lot of sense as an attribution, as Anonymous isn't really a group of any conventional kind.)
This looks like a small DoS against one router, as any random could do (and perhaps has done), but of course, .kp doesn't have much connection to the public internet, so that's about all it takes. And it isn't exactly a big impact on them as a country - yet it's still knocking a country off the internet.
I believe the attribution to DPRK is very probably false. I think the Sony hack was quite probably conducted by non-state actors, but there is far too little information to be sure. The US have unfortunately impeded honest forensic investigations.
And I believe that attacks on the internet, any part of it, are destructive and not constructive. The US would be extremely displeased if the same - cutting it off the internet - happened to it, so I dearly hope they are not stupid and short-sighted enough to be responsible! Whomever is behind this deserves condemnation.
Perhaps we need a treaty. Yet when a few determined individuals can do offensively essentially what a nation can, I'm not sure how that's possible. But focusing on offense will only make everything worse - the US probably has more to lose from so-called "cyber war" than any other nation on earth. It should be leading the charge against it. It isn't. And that's a huge mistake.
Is it weird to anyone else that all this "cyber warfare" is happening over the release of a movie. A comedy movie, not a documentary or propaganda film. I don't know if media has every had such an inadvertent impact on politics before. I would say it's a strange age we live in, but I think this strangeness is all from North Korea.
There seems that people living under regimes with limited freedom often fail to comprehend that people living in other countries might produce something without the explicit approval of their government.
To the North Koreans, it is beyond comprehension that people living in the US made something, rather than the US government making it. To them, if Americans made it, that means America made it.
This misunderstanding isn't limited to works coming out of the US of course. Another example of this failure to comprehend freedom of expression is the aftermath of the Muhammad cartoons published by some Danish newspapers. Enraged extremists around the world began rioting in front of Danish Embassies, as though the cartoons were drawn, commissioned, or even approved by the Danish government.
See also: The souring of Chinese-Norwegian relations after the Norwegian Nobel Committee (which is a private organization which awards a private prize, despite having some members selected by Norwegian parliament) awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo.
> the Norwegian Nobel Committee (which is a private organization which awards a private prize, despite having some members selected by Norwegian parliament)
The Peace Prize is a bit closer to the Norwegian government than that. Alfred Nobel left that part of his will directly to the Norwegian Parliament, not to a private organization, and he tasked the Parliament with using the money to establish a peace prize. The Parliament established a committee, the Nobel Committee, to administer the award, and traditionally its members were a subset of standing members of Parliament, with the partisan makeup of the Nobel Committee reflecting each party's representation in Parliament.
In recent years they have instituted a rule that current parliamentarians can't sit on the committee, and instead retired parliamentarians are chosen, to given it slightly more distance. But they're still 100% selected by Parliament, and allocated to each party in proportion to party representation in the Parliament.
But the Norwegian government has absolutely nothing to do with who gets the prize, which is the whole point here. The fact that China gets angry at Norway et al because of a committee in Norway gave the peace prize to someone almost nobody in China knows about is a bit petty.
The cabinet doesn't directly award the prize, no. But Parliament chooses the people who choose the prize. That seems like exercising a pretty strong degree of control over who gets the prize, as with any other committee appointed by Parliament. And worse, they are specifically political appointments, not an attempt at appointing a quasi-independent "body of experts". There was a move some decades ago to change the makeup so the committee would be comprised of independent experts, from e.g. the academic, NGO, or scientific sectors, and maybe even including non-Norwegians. But that was rejected, so the committee continues to be staffed exclusively by important politicians.
For example, the current committee has the following members: Thorbjørn Jagland (Labour Party), Kaci Kullmann Five (Conservatives), Inger-Marie Ytterhorn (Progress Party), Berit Reiss-Andersen (Labour Party), Gunnar Stålsett (Centre Party).
A slightly different way of putting it might be: the Nobel Prize is awarded jointly by the major political parties of Norway, via their chosen representatives.
The current reality is that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is a private body, and it is not currently the role of Norwegian Parliament to dictate to it who they may or may not award prizes to.
Nobel may not have set it up that way personally, but that is how it is currently set up.
I have seen this line of thought some times now but I can't help but having a hard time believing it to be true. The notion that in other countries people have the right to express themselves freely is not particularly hard to grasp and pass on, even if told otherwise by state media (which are probably not very well respected under oppressive regimes.)
Think of it as molding and allowing. The nation molds people into producing the same unsurprising results (I mean the frequency of couch-potatoes-who-get-offended-by-the-sight-of-alcohol-but-not-guns is unmatched in the rest of the world, despite the freedom) and lets them to make unrespectful drawings. In which case the nation is as much producing the drawings as the individuals.
> There seems that people living under regimes with limited freedom often fail to comprehend that people living in other countries might produce something without the explicit approval of their government.
Approval may be given in countries which are free, but it is not required. If it is required, then that country is not free. Members of the government may chose to praise or condemn any work they please, but in that capacity they are no different from anyone else. We do not strip our elected officials of the right to comment on art.
That's incredibly naive. The likelihood of a Hollywood corporation releasing a North Korean movie that made any endorsements of the country is virtually nil. It is structurally impossible. That is in part thanks to the extremely blurred distinction between US corporations and the state.
If North Korea suddenly became a US ally, though, it would happen eventually.
Hollywood has often been a front for US policymakers to covertly influence domestic opinion. You may be oblivious to this, but I doubt the North Koreans are.
> "The likelihood of a Hollywood corporation releasing a North Korean movie that made any endorsements of the country is virtually nil. It is structurally impossible."
The likelihood of Hollywood releasing a movie that praises the Nazis is virtually nil, but that has fuck-all to do with "blurred distinctions" between Hollywood and the US Government.
Before the US entered the war it actually wouldn't have been all that unlikely. They had plenty of supporters. Only after did it become an impossibility.
And yes, that was everything to do with the US government.
To North Korean culture, I'm not sure they see the humor in satirizing their leader who may as well fart rainbows for all they know. It's a slap in the face, regardless of who did it or with which intentions.
God knows this isn't the first time North Korea has been the butt of jokes, but it is the first time it was done so publicly, on such a large scale, directly out of hollywood, that the entire world then consumes. To not respond would appear weak, I think.
Propaganda [mass noun] Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.
Lots of films, many I particularly like, are propaganda films.
Pleading comedy or satire doesn't prevent something being propaganda, and featuring the slow-motion fiery death of the leader of a country that you have bombed and not yet made peace with, I think qualifies.
Your excellent point has a follow on: who exactly is responsible for deciding when or if such a retaliation is to occur? Is there any oversight? Is there any accountability? Who are the individuals involved? Which agency is involved? Is Obama fessing up or not? I am not saying that I agree or disagree with the retaliation, only that open accountability is necessary, precisely such that our collective liberty is safeguarded.
If this is not the US, then the cybersecurity apparatus of the US and other nations must surely provide more information about which entity has the power to take down an entire country's internet (even if, admittely, this is a small country that is easy to take down?). We need to know either that this is an explicit retaliatory attack (in which case, who is deciding the legitimacy and proportion of this retaliation), or if not, we need to know very clearly that our cybersecurity apparatus is aware of who did it, and if not, what are they doing to become aware of such issues in the future (with guarantees of public disclosure when this is not incompatible with national security).
Basically, we cannot have a situation where signficant swathes of the internet can be taken down with nobody knowing what's going on, and what the principles are behind any decisions made. That would be a basic affront to freedom.
Nebulous, intangible entities with the power to perpetrate or retaliate with no accountability, are extremely dangerous.
I see a significant dearth of information here, information that is in the public interest whoever is behind it.
Dyn Research (née Renesys) was quoted in the article, and typically posts in-depth articles when this type of thing happens. [1]
Based on the quote[2], I interpret the failure as someone attacking the routers themselves, overwhelming their control planes to the point where they can't sustain BGP sessions reliably.
[2] "Their networks are under duress,” Mr. Madory said. “This is consistent with a DDoS attack on their routers,” he said, referring to a distributed denial of service attack, in which attackers flood a network with traffic until it collapses under the load."
If routers are being directly attacked, the router IPs can just be null routed, as they don't need to be reachable by the Internet at large to be the next hop for passing traffic between routers. Some networks use unadvertised IP space for their router point-to-point and loopback IPs for that reason. Guess it's not too surprising that North Korea doesn't have better network engineers.
I did see that, but it didn't quite measure up to a legitimate data point. "under duress" clearly states that there is "duress", but "consistent with" is somewhat conjecture-y.
If that is a verbatim quote, then Dyn is telling is that there was an attack (duress involved, no ifs buts or maybes).
If that quote has been altered even slightly[1], we're back to "NK won't pick up the phone no more"[2].
[1] Any of these would remove the "attack" edge of this:
Their networks...
* seem to be under duress
* (seem to be/are) down/nonresponsive
[2] but we don't know if someone blew up the switchboard, or if they switched it off themselves.
Now that the actual source (Dyn) put up their work:
> Who caused this, and how? A long pattern of up-and-down connectivity, followed by a total outage, seems consistent with a fragile network under external attack. But it’s also consistent with more common causes, such as power problems. Point causes such as breaks in fiberoptic cables, or deliberate upstream provider disconnections, seem less likely because they don’t generate prolonged instability before a total failure. We can only guess. The data themselves don’t speak to motivations, or distinguish human factors from physical infrastructure problems. [1]
...it turns out that the DDOS part was indeed pure conjecture and over-hyped BS. Thanks, NY times.
Also, they changed the title of the article, if not more. Classy.
Yeah I caught that too. I interpreted the withdrawn to mean that they stopped advertising any routes for their ip block via BGP. Which could be a pulled plug or a DDOS. I think most likely a DDOS by a random party, but doesn't sound like much actual evidence to any specifics.
Post from Dyn Research up now. They make the point that the failure happened gradually, after hours of instability - so it's consistent with a DDOS or a hardware failure in the routers, but not with someone "pulling the plug" or a cable being cut.
as far as I can tell (from one read of the post) the internet is down. I did not see any sort of quote from a network security analyst from a neutral party analyzing packets or saying it was a DDoS.
It is not the style of DPNK for them to pull the plug, that would make them appear weak to the outside world when in fact they did invent the internet and have superior everything on everything.
> It is not the style of DPNK for them to pull the plug, that would make them appear weak to the outside world when in fact they did invent the internet and have superior everything on everything.
You misunderstand. They broke backwards compatibility with our puny Internet v1. It's progress, baby ;)
With such a small subnet, the idea that all the various sysadmins who read this article are immediately going to run a quick ping check to confirm NK is still down, and that in itself turning into sufficient traffic to DDoS the entire country, makes me giggle a bit.
Well, NK likely does not have the best
electric grid. So, maybe the problem
was just their electric grid! Or maybe
the problem was someone clicking on the
wrong icon or push button in some system
management software, maybe written in NK?
But if the outage was from a DDoS from
the USG, then I have to regard it as mostly
a publicity stunt: That is, I have to
believe that the NSA and CIA have
much better control over, penetration of,
NK computing than just a DDoS!
I mean, NK has, what, bootleg, never updated
copies of Win 95, Win 2K, Win XP SP0, really
old IE with lots of ActiveX pages, really
old FF and Flash? The place has to be
a computer version of a fire trap without
a firewall! NSA and CIA
rootkits have to be tripping over each
other all over NK like rats in a
garbage pile.
Oh, did someone compare NK with a garbage
pile? Oh, how pejorative! I mean, how
could one regard that pinnacle of fashion
that gave the world the unique haircut of
the Great Patriotic Leader, Jr.?
Besides, their girls nearly all look
so young, that is, small and thin,
possibly because nearly everyone there
is thin. Maybe they get a lot of exercise,
aren't very warm in the winters, and
don't eat very much, or all of those.
Obama already calibrated the governments stance on this ordeal when he said the Sony hack was vandalism and NOT terrorism. I don't believe the government being responsible for NK's internet problems is in line with that.
He also seemed to believe that the fault for any censorship as a result of the hack lies squarely within the US.
IMO it lies squarely with the FBI who wouldn't say it was not a credible threat. If you come to the FBI with a threat, and they say that it's credible, what are you going to do next?
After the government told me something about a security threat? The same government that puts us on these orange and yellow and red alerts and nothing ever happens? And if something does happen there is no alert, or there are too many security advisories they don't know which ones are credible and then the whole incident gets politicised, turned into a blame game, and broken down into sound bites for Rush and ammo for polarized netizens to spew at each other turning every comment section on every current event article, ever, into a partisan war?
Yeah, I'm not sure. But I can tell you I don't know a person alive or an institution operating today for which I could tell you how I would react to information they gave me without being fully seeped in the context in which it was given.
Also, I don't know anything about what the FBI did or didn't say. I just know what was released(yeah :|) on what Obama said, which was that he would have liked for Sony or the Movie chains to have reached out.
Ultimately, I think it's a societal issue. Our culture has become terrorized since 9/11. We are a bunch of wet blankets. It's a huge problem that we have no spine outside the military/intelligence community. We just get led around by the nose.
Of course, NK won't be pissed at all and they're not going to retaliate at all (yeah I know it's probably the goal of this attack).
This might be the first steps of the first cyber world war for all I know.
The only good thing is that only the elite will be affected by the collapse of NK Internet (no porn for a while). The average citizen probably can't even grasp what the net is, and none of her life is linked to it.
From my understanding of NK, if they retaliate, my bet is that it will be in the realm of physical and not cyber at all. Possibly blowing up the first american person/property they can reach.
Maybe the whole point is to instigate an escalation from "alleged vandalism" to "verifiable act of war".
The elite do, I imagine this will affect them in a big way. For all we know a few addresses on the public space could also be acting as routes for the private intranet - I imagine they're not completely seperated.
My interpretation of the general history of warfare is that countries agree on restraint once some situation has occurred that all sides agree should never happen again. Mustard gas in WWI, nuclear weapons in WWII...
Hopefully this doesn't spiral out of control. It's not clear where the boundaries are that we don't want to cross.
Well, right now, we're in a place where The Internet really only facilitates greater efficiency in telecommunications, and does so in such a way that can be distributed and encapsulated across many independent partitions.
In other words, whatever we would be capable of accomplishing with pen and ink on paper, and carrier pigeons, or smoke signals; that's what the internet does, but at nearly the speed of light, for volumes of data beyond anything worth attempting as a physical implementation.
In that sense, the only thing that denial of service really accomplishes for a hermit state like North Korea (which presumably attempts to censor the external internet for it's non-elite commoners already), is such that they lose face on "the world stage" where they receive no respect anyway.
The boundaries where things start to get ugly, in a new and truly modern sense, would be circumstances where autonomous weapons platforms run rampant, and inflict wide-spread death and destruction in various theaters of conflict at scales of their own choosing. I don't think that's a reality yet, at least not without a nuclear exchange. Drones, for the most part, are still essentially remote-controlled vehicles, operated by humans, particularly with respect to the decision to use force.
A scaled back version of that, which we might see emerge, before autonomous robots are used to crush a nation like it were a load of dirty laundry (or rather, before robots start to decide for themselves, which nations, or regions to crush), is infrastructure attacks that cripple things like electric and water services for extended periods, triggering cascades of famine and disease. For that to occur, a country would have to foolishly place all of its eggs in one basket, and lay prone to catastrophic failure without proper redundancies in place.
>>> Hopefully this doesn't spiral out of control. It's not clear where the boundaries are that we don't want to cross.
It's been spiraling out of control for years.
I'm actually quite surprised at how restrained our government has been to actually engage some of these rogue countries after decades of ongoing attacks.
At some point, you have to return fire.
And yes, I'm quite aware the US has been active in several high profile attacks. Unfortunately, it pales in comparison to what China, DPRK, and several middle eastern countries have been engaged in for much longer.
I'd be pretty happy if governments all decided "cyberwarfare" was an acceptable substitute for the real thing. Nobody dies, some money is lost, some important people are embarrassed.
Cyberwarfare can do a lot more than DDoS a router. Haven't you ever read the articles that pop up from time to time about Internet scans that find machines which should in no way ever be connected to the Internet, or even in the same room with a machine connected to the Internet? And then they try to log into those machines using the manufacturer's default passwords....
In short, critical infrastructure all over the world is being needlessly put at risk. The operators are placing their own knives across their own throats, and all a network-based attacker would need to do is jog a few elbows.
A few people might die. It's not like anybody is putting kill-bots out there, connected to the Internet, with an easily-toggled BERSERK_RAMPAGE flag (yet), but I think water treatment plants and electrical power grids are probably vulnerable to attack, and could cause some folks at the margins to die.
> Nobody dies, some money is lost, some important people are embarrassed
If there's one thing the Sony breach and other major hacks over the last few years have illustrated, it's that there is no clear limit to the damage that can be done from something like this.
EDIT: To me, what's so frightening about this is the lack of historical precedent for conflicts between nations in the form of cyberwarfare. We don't know what could happen. We don't know if the damage will be limited to financial cost and embarrassment, and we don't know that a scuffle between nations on the Internet will remain contained as such.
"Nobody dies" is likely false. Think about first responders. Think about medical systems in hospitals. Think about all the second-order and third-order side effects if the Internet goes down in an industrialized country in 2014 for longer than, say, a few hours.
And the right to privacy of innocent noncombatants is compromised in the process. There will in fact be casualties in a cyber war, even if people are not killed or physically injured.
If the power grid goes down in Canada and the US in January, then people will die. If it stays down because turbines have been damaged, then lots of people will die.
The smae way they decide in a normal war. They keep going until a treaty is signed. Typically the side who is worse off "throws in the towel" so to speak by signing a treaty that holds the favor of the stronger side.
NK is not going to launch a nuclear attack on the US. The point of NKs weapons is a barrier to entry to invasion. eg. If you attack us Seoul gets nuked. Once they've launched nuclear weapons there is no point in not invading them.
If NK nuked Seoul, in all honesty China would probably nuke Pyongyang long before the Americans, or just send eleventy million troops across the border.
The entire reason NK exists is because China prefers a border with NK rather than a unified Korea sympathetic to US interests.
As others have pointed out, it's unclear that the US government is itself involved. Neither the attacks on Sony and the attacks on the North Korean internet links require uniquely state-owned military resources. They just require a relatively accessible set of knowledge, skills, and practical tools. We even get the term "script kiddies" from the long-running case of those with knowledge and skills creating tools that encapsulate same.
So what happens in a world where "warfare" level activities, causing significant disruption to nations and multinational corporations, are accessible to essentially random individuals? In the U.S. we might liken it to our mythology: the lawlessness of the Wild West. Yet it seems that lawlessness with this kind of ease-to-impact ratio is unprecedented.
How immature... if it was the US. So, North Korea (we still don't know for sure) caused hundreds of millions of dollars of loss to Sony Pictures and US caused how much damage to North Korea (which doesn't care much about the internet)?... Well, close to $0. How proportional is that?!
So, has it been 100% confirmed that NK is behind all of this? I don't know, I realize that NK is like some hormone crazed pubescent boy, but shit just seems weird.
What if this all turns out to be some trolling by some third party, maybe even not government affiliated.
> So, has it been 100% confirmed that NK is behind all of this?
There is no actual released evidence, only statements from government agencies. The information that has been released says that some of the attacks did originate from servers hosted by NK IP space. That's it.
NK itself says that they didn't do it, and that doesn't match their previous threatening behavior.
Good point. And to the same point, neither do accusations anymore....
I think there is a lot going on and we don't know anything about it. I'm not sure if this for national security reasons or because we would be outraged beyond belief....
>I think there is a lot going on and we don't know anything about it.
You said it. You know, NK claims that the movie was USG propaganda. And, to the average American ear, that notion probably sounds completely nuts on its face.
But, then, there's this that we learned just a couple of weeks ago:
> You said it. You know, NK claims that the movie was USG propaganda. And, to the average American ear, that notion probably sounds completely nuts on its face.
As it should. There's no need for propaganda against the PDRK, they've done a pretty good job of making themselves look bad on their own.
>There's no need for propaganda against the PDRK, they've done a pretty good job of making themselves look bad on their own.
One would certainly think so.
Still, the notion that the USG would even consider involving itself in such a movie for propaganda purposes is about as ridiculous-sounding as infiltrating the Cuban rap scene to do the same.
I suspect this to be the work of the US government, but out of curiosity I wonder if there would be any legal consequences were Sony or another private party to launch a DDOS attack on North Korea from the US. Obviously no one would be extradited to NK, but I'm curious if that would run afoul of US law.
If not, it might be fun to create some software or a mobile app that would keep this going indefinitely. I imagine a "CrashNK" app would get alot of downloads.
IANAL.. but the US laws on cybercrime aren't limited to attacks within US borders. For example, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act says "such trafficking affects interstate or foreign commerce".
This is illegal. Under the CFAA, any unauthorized access of any "protected" system anywhere (that causes at least $5,000 in damages, but hell, anything over a 1-2 man business can have $5,000 in damages, in legal terms, in a few seconds) is a felony.
Protected system:
"including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States"
I think taking down NK internet would be considered affecting foreign commerce/communication.
But, I wonder, if a case could be made for such an attack being a defensive maneuver on the part of the USG? That is, due to the claimed recent activity by NK and future threats articulated by NK to engage in cyber warfare, might taking their access offline be construed as a defensive measure?
If so, would there be anything under the U.S. Code or otherwise that would supersede the CFAA; or are there exclusions in the CFAA itself?
Acts of the executive branch (or of anyone the executive branch agrees with) can escape criminal prosecution (whether or not they are technically crimes) simply because (1) the executive branch controls prosecutions, and (2) the executive branch has the power of the pardon.
Criminal law, except from a political standpoint, does not constrain the policy of the executive branch.
So, you're saying that the GP's point is moot, in that the USG would disregard any perceived constraints imposed by the CFAA in limiting an attack like this?
If so, we're effectively saying the same thing, with the exception that I do believe individuals are, and know themselves to be, technically liable for criminal conduct. As such, I believe that individuals and groups working within the USG (Executive or otherwise) do seek legal cover for their actions.
My point isn't moot because I'm not assuming the USG is behind this attack. It's still illegal, even if the USG wouldn't enforce it against itself. If it was a third party, then they would definitely be prosecuted if the USG had proof/extradition. That was my point.
Well, I wasn't saying it was moot, even if you were assigning responsibility to the USG! I was just pointing out that it was the implication of dragonwriter's comment with regard to potential USG involvement.
So, rather than haggling with dragownwriter over that bit, I went on to point out that I don't believe the USG would be constrained by it for different reasons than the outright impunity he suggested; that is, that they would find legal justification for it.
But, I do see that I may have misconstrued your comment by over-focus on the USG involvement bit. My bad.
> I went on to point out that I don't believe the USG would be constrained by it for different reasons than the outright impunity he suggested; that is, that they would find legal justification for it.
I don't think that's really different; finding the legal justification to cite for it is responding to the political constraint (it also is a means of invoking the impunity, because reliance on such a legal justification provided by superiors within the executive branch itself creates a colorable legal defense against future prosecution without requiring an explicit pardon, even if the justification itself is flawed. This has been identified by many experts as one of the problems with actually prosecuting the people directly involved in torture in the US criminal justice system.)
Yes, but the larger question is whether computers in NK "affect interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States". Since we don't conduct business with NK, I think it wouldn't meet the definition.
Do we not have official communications with NK (really not sure about this, it might be diplomatically and legally we do not, but someone more informed could correct me)?
The CFAA is so vague. It almost always is interpreted in a manner supportive of the USG's prosecution, go figure.
> I wonder if there would be any legal consequences were Sony or another private party to launch a DDOS attack on North Korea from the US. Obviously no one would be extradited to NK, but I'm curious if that would run afoul of US law.
We could consider an analogy: would Sony run afoul of US (or international) law if they knocked North Korea offline by launching highly-targetted ballistic missiles from their US offices?
My gut feeling is yes, that's illegal. If not, then the US is even more self-righteous than it appears!
>would Sony run afoul of US (or international) law if they knocked North Korea offline by launching highly-targetted ballistic missiles from their US offices?
That isn't remotely close to an analogy. Mere possession of explosive devices, or even the materials to make them, is a crime in the US. However, it isn't clear if attacking a remote network is a crime under US law. Normally it would be up to the victim country to prosecute and request extradition, but there would be no extradition from the US or any other country (except perhaps from China, one of NK's few allies) in this case.
> I suspect this to be the work of the US government
If true, the backlash could be significant. There's already large portions of the world trying to de-centralize the internet from the US (routing around, etc) after the Snowden leaks and discoveries of egregious abuses of power over the internet by the US government. No single country should have the capability (or right) to knock an entire other country off the internet, North Korea or not...
The US has a lot more capability than that. Wrong or right, the US (and many other countries) could knock North Korea from the map entirely. Lives are much more important than Internet access.
> Any civilized world will oppose hacker attacks or terror threats. But a movie like ‘The Interview,’ which makes fun of the leader of an enemy of the U.S., is nothing to be proud of for Hollywood and U.S. society,” an editorial in the newspaper said. “No matter how the U.S. society looks at North Korea and Kim Jong-un, Kim is still the leader of the country. The vicious mocking of Kim is only a result of senseless cultural arrogance.[1]
China's position on this particular incident is just a reflexive defense of the concept of "no interference in other countries' affairs, regardless of how bad they look" something which China strongly advocates for its own reasons, not for the benefit of NK.
China's general attitude over the last decade or two has been a gradually increasing private irritation with NK's behavior and while China still tends to defend NK in public, these defenses seem more and more perfunctory as time goes on. There's a sense that while they value NK as a communist buffer state, the Chinese government has little love for the NK regime in particular, and wishes they'd get their act together.
Cutting off a major source of communication to a paranoid and armed nation seems like a really bad idea. Ask any horror film director - imagined enemies and actions are much worse than being able to see the monster.
No offense (to any who might be vehement supporters of NK I guess, though I can't imagine there are many), but I can't imagine the NK internet is/was very big/strong/fault-tolerant.
Sometimes I think the US's responses are so disproportionate, if someone was to actually attack their country, they would respond by attacking the entire world.
I don't think it is : why provoke a country that has nothing to loose in a cyber war when mostly everything in the US is dependent on the Internet ?
Look at what happened to Sony (even if NK may had nothing to do with it) and imagine what would happen if NK decided to shut down several US companies 'Sony style'.
The financial damage would be tremendous for the economy.
IMO cyber war is a bit like nuclear war : the goal is not to use it, or life can become really complicated really fast.
Okay, seriously - who else is making the weird, kinda unsettling connection between the recent seizure of the Pirate Bay and this whole 'The Interview' business with North Korea?
If the Pirate Bay was still online, would 'The Interview' have leaked already?
Is the seizure of The Pirate Bay linked to the intentional suppression of the release of this film?
Why would the government raiding TPB concede to do this for terrorists?
I mean, I hate to be one of those conspiracy nuts, but - it really seems like this is all a big distraction for the start of some new strange form of cyberterrorism.
"If the Pirate Bay was still online, would 'The Interview' have leaked already?"
No, the Pirate Bay is largest and most visible torrent sharing site, but by no means the only one. If anyone wanted to leak Interview there are plenty of options.
Except TPB doesn't actually host the leak, all they do is index the .torrent files, so if it's going to leak, it'll leak, and another tracker will have a link to it. The takedown and the DDoS came pretty close to each other, but it's important to remember that TPB gets taken down every year or two, it's just the cost of doing business with them. I don't see compelling evidence for correlation
While I do agree the timing is bizarre (after all, TPB was in Sweden for 6+ years and how many US takedown/seizure requests were ignored by the Sweden officials, but suddenly now they act?), I don't think it's necessarily related. It sure does make for a good conspiracy however.
This outage won't hurt North Korea. At best it makes for a good head line to see the whole country offline. At worst this means that their elite citizens cannot access social networks or email outside of their country.
I really hope this isn't the doing's of the US government. You'd hope they could do better than this..