Security
State Dept. remains sure on DPRK involvement in Sony hack
Dec 30th
The State Department said Monday that it remains confident in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s conclusion that North Korea was responsible for the cyber attack on Sony — despite a growing number of voices saying that might not be the case.
There has been some skepticism about North Korea’s involvement since the first reports earlier in December and that has increased in the last week.
- Linguistic analysis of the English suggests a Russian speaker, not a Korean
- The IP addresses used by the hackers were on compromised machines that could have been used by anyone.
- One of the latest reports suggests that a former Sony employee might have More >
North Korea’s Internet suffers more attacks
Dec 29th
North Korea’s Internet connection with the world suffered outages on December 27 and December 28.
The latest instability on the connection began around 0400 UTC (1 p.m. local time in Pyongyang) on Sunday and continued for a couple of hours, according to monitoring by Dyn Research. The U.S.-based organization recorded several instances in which connections to the four sub-networks that make up the North Korean Internet were completely unavailable.
An outage between North Korea and the Internet on December 28, 2014 (Image: Dyn Research)
The outage followed a larger one on Saturday evening that appears to have begun at around 1040 UTC (7:40 p.m. More >
North Korea accuses US of Internet disturbance
Dec 27th
North Korea has accused the U.S. of disrupting its Internet service and has renewed a call to participate in a joint investigation into claims that it hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment.
[UPDATE: English recording of Voice of Korea added below.]
The country’s websites were offline for more than nine hours on December 22 after an apparent denial of service attack.
In a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Saturday, the country’s National Defence Commission laid blame for the Internet problem at the feet of the U.S., saying the country “started disturbing the internet operation of major media of the DPRK.”
Earlier in the week, the U.S. More >
Sony puts ‘The Interview’ online
Dec 25th
What a difference a week makes. The Christmas Day release of “The Interview” is back on and Sony has already begun offering the movie online.
The movie, a comedy in which two TV reporters embark on a secret mission to kill Kim Jong Un, appeared on YouTube and Google Play on December 23 at 1pm ET. It costs $5.99 to rent for 48 hours and $15 to own.
Sony’s ‘The Interview’ became available on Google Play from 1800 UTC on December 24, 2014.
Google said that it was first approached by Sony on December 17, on the same day that is announced it would More >
Voice of Korea on the Sony hack
Dec 23rd
North Korea’s powerful National Defense Commission responded with its first statement on the Sony hack and accusations by the U.S. that it was responsible. The statement was read out on Voice of Korea, the country’s international shortwave radio service, and makes interesting listening.
It’s not exactly the same as the text statement that was carried on KCNA and appears to be a slightly different translation.
The most noticeable thing about the statement is how much the NDC appears to be picking up from cues in the U.S. media. Many of its arguments are similar to those being debated in public:
- Killing a head of state, More >
North Korea’s Internet back after probable attack
Dec 23rd
North Korea’s Internet connection with the world has returned to service after a nine and a half hour outage that followed hours of patchy performance.
The cause of the outage is unknown, although several experts think it was probably due to an external distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This involves flooding web servers and other Internet hardware with so much traffic that they become overloaded and cannot respond to legitimate traffic. It’s not an actual hack of the system and so the situation is normalized soon after the DDOS flow of traffic stops.
Dyn Research provided this graph of the attack that shows More >
Where do we stand on the Sony hack?
Dec 22nd
It’s been a busy few days for North Korea watchers. After a couple of weeks of no solid news on the Sony hack, the FBI has finally released a few details from its preliminary investigation
That’s great news because there has been a lot of confused reporting on the case. The leaks from the FBI have generally come through national security reporters, not computer security reporters, so we’ve seen a number of differing claims:
There was general confusion about the common hacker practice of routing traffic through compromised machines in other countries. Here are some headlines from last week:
- Evidence in Sony hack attack More >
Kim Jong Un probably doesn’t want you to see these either
Dec 22nd
Whether North Korea is behind the hacking of Sony or not, it’s certainly not too pleased with the movie and doesn’t want it shown. Sony pulled the movie from theaters and said Sunday it’s figuring out a video-on-demand related. In the meantime, here are a few move videos that Pyongyang probably doesn’t like too much: This report, from the CBS show “60 Minutes,” interviews Shin Dong-hyuk. He was born in “Camp 14,” a North Korean labor camp, and managed to escape to tell the tale of the horrors of North Korea’s gulags.
Sky News goes to South Korea to talk to North More >
North Korea responds to hack allegations
Dec 21st
North Korea has reacted angrily to U.S. assertions that it was behind a devastating cyber attack on Sony Pictures.
[UPDATE: The TV announcement is below the English statement]
The official state-run news agency carried a statement from the country’s Foreign Ministry on Saturday that promised “serious consequences” if a joint investigation with the DPRK doesn’t tale place.
It’s not the first time this year the country has demanded a joint investigation into international allegations against it. In May, the country wanted such after it was accused of responsibility for three drones found crashed in South Korea near the shared border with North Korea. The country More >
State Dept. remarks on Sony hack
Dec 20th
Just as President Obama’s news conference was wrapping up, the State Department news conference was beginning.
The questions were a little more detailed, as you’d expect from reporters who understand the ins and outs of U.S. foreign relations so well. They centered around the option of putting North Korea back on the list of state sponsors of terror and what effect that might have. And they also came back to the issue of whether State Dept. officials saw the movie before and signed off on the scenes.
The reporters reference a letter sent by Senator Robert Menendez, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to Secretary More >
