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

[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 and data that should have long ago been archived was kept lying around in files for anyone to read.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.