Obama's Bumbling, Stumbling America Loses its First Cyber War to a Hotel Room Full of Nork Kids

Reaganite Republican ^ | 18 December 2014 | Reaganite Republican

[Reaganite Republican]

As Newt Gingrich noted yesterday, the surrender by Sony Pictures to a shadowy group of North Korean hackers has set a chilling precedent...
just wait 'til they grab hold of one of our nuclear plants
(like the Israelis already did  to Iran)...

BIG defeat for the US and Japan here, and a terrifying incident, to be sure (that's why they call it 'terrorism')- so now this little tinpot-nothing-of-a-country has substantial unchecked power/influence right inside the United States of America? Can you imagine Ronald Reagan/Cap Weinberger letting this go down without KJU being made to seriously regret it?

Of course, Obama was too busy strapping-on-the-kneepads/bowing to grizzled octogenarian commies in Havana to be concerned with Hollywood's Sony Pictures being brought to their knees -involuntarily- by some other commies from Pyongyang. And what's the difference between these two vile, failed, and oppressive regimes, really?

Remember how Obama was portrayed as this really modern, high-tech president when he and David Plouffe were exploiting social media to put/keep them in power? NOW that we need them to drive technological development
-fighting cyber-terrorism emanating from an utterly hostile state - he's somehow suddenly absorbed in ill-advised dealings with the Castros
(for no pressing or beneficial reason I can even imagine). 

Willing loser Obama will explain-away our defeat at the hands of North Korea with some droning, hollow horse%$#&, point a finger (in some other direction that his own), and do nothing, in all likelihood. After all, DHS have got their hands full bussing-in illegal immigrants, while the CIA/NSA are probably too busy compiling lists of TEA partiers to be rounded-up when his (orchestrated) martial law hits. Shame that Ferguson ran out of steam, but there'll be other fires to stoke.

The (victorious) North Korean government hacking squad is said to have teens as young as 17 working to attack/control computer systems belonging to Pyongyang's 'enemies', both real and imagined. These geeks-for-socialism are known as Bureau 121, engaging in what's known as 'The Secret War' against primarily South Korean, Japanese, and American targets. The program employs over 1800 'soldiers' in all... and it appears they're just getting started.

DPRK Bureau 121's top hacking squad reportedly headquartered 
at the Chilbosan Hotel in nearby/cross-border Shenyang, China

With a major cell operating out of a hotel just over the border in China, the program attracts the North Korea's very best-and-brightest, with relatively high pay and status for the Hermit Kingdom. Defectors revealed that the group has pounded-away at South Korean sites for five years now. Worse yet, the Norks have been working on violating military computer systems for quite some time too... unsettlingly, nobody really knows how far they've gotten with it.

Alas, the bottom line is we are very, very vulnerable to even a small, impoverished regime like the DPRK -who actually resorted to the strategy out of necessity (brought by military weakness)- so hard not to wonder what the Russians are going to unleash on us now that the wounded bear has backed-itself into a corner, bleeding- they've got zillions of hackers, and have been messing with US banks and other institutions already. Russia is now just another failed, angry dictatorship with an axe to grind (and on a budget)...
so expect the worst from Ivan, going forward.

Perhaps President Obama would find it most easy, immediate, and
-most importantly- beneficial to his own ruinous political/personal agenda to just surrender to North Korea and establish relations there, too- why not, you traitorous *#&$%.

[Swordmaker]

I am not going to give Obama a pass on this but I think an attack on a Hollywood studio hardly constitutes even a skirmish in what would be a serious cyber war. IF the North Koreans, masquerading as the "Guardians of Peace" pulled this off, it demonstrates more the paranoid nature of their insane leadership. Why telegraph your capabilities to easily break into an essentially wide-open system?

This Sony break-in doesn't sound like cyber-war. It sounds like teen-age hackers playing gotcha. It sounds more like the amateur activities of "Anonymous," gleefully being destructive, instead of the moves of a nation-state acting against the interests of another power in the world. If the North Koreans had such sophistication, why waste it on a personal vendetta against Sony? Why not surreptitiously invade the military computers of South Korea? If they were wanting to destroy Sony, why release data? Why not just destroy the data in their computers? Erase the works in progress? Why depend on public release of ancient salary schedules to cause havoc? Communists would have no clue why that would harm a company. . . and certainly the unsophisticated Norks, not used to modern society would have even less.

This does not smack of any high degree of sophistication as the administration wants us to believe. From what I have read, Sony's computers were secured by weak passwords, and a degree of sloppiness in security design that most companies would have found appalling. Too many people had access to too many levels of their supposedly secure data. . . and data that should have long ago been archived was kept lying around in files for anyone to read. Too much was interconnected in the general servers without "need-to-know" passworded walls between them. Too many people had administrative level access. . . and those people had very weak, easily broken passwords.

I think there is another game being played out here.