8 ms·

The only rational response to this is deep, deep skepticism. In the old days of the USSR, while very difficult, it was at least conceivable that you could just

by rsync 9y ago

The only rational response to this is deep, deep skepticism. In the old days of the USSR, while very difficult, it was at least conceivable that you could just fly to moscow and see if they were eating their children there or burning priests or god knows whatever else. There was a natural limit to the deception that could occur and further a normal person could make conclusions about the things they saw with their own eyes. Now, the enemy that "we have always been at war with" is a completely isolated (and economically trivial) state that virtually nobody travels to and who is attacking us with secret cyber weapons that only a domain expert with highly specialized experience could even recognize, much less qualify. And the people that are telling us are those same people that are, or are not, secretly recording all of our conversations. There's not one little thing there you could take at face value.

spullara 9y ago
They are also launching ballistic missiles so maybe we should worry a little bit. Also: https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/04/5-eye-opening-documentaries-about-north-korea.html https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/04/5-eye-opening...
sdfjlkjsdf7 9y ago
Agreed. Right off the bat, which I applaud in a way, they describe the strength of their argument. It's not very convincing. "...according to U.S. intelligence officials. The assessment, which was issued internally last week and has not been made public, is based on an analysis of tactics, techniques and targets that point with “moderate confidence” to North Korea’s spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, according to an individual familiar with the report." Which US IO? Not released publicly? That's handy. Which tactics, techniques and targets? Oh right, not public. Can we get examples of "moderate confidence?" What's high and low look like? Which individual? Much truth has come from leaks like this, but also a lot of smoke and mirrors. This could be a WH ploy to gin up reasons to target NK, for example.
problems 9y ago
Indeed, especially given that it takes so little information to fool such a metric. I'd go so far as to say that it's almost guaranteed that another nation state or even dedicated group of individuals could feasibly do it. There's just too little information to work off when all you have are a few binaries - with functions that can be trivially copied and modified at a binary level or reverse engineered and recompiled to similar binaries combined with some VPN IP addresses and a few assorted bits of information about attack patterns which are trivial to copy if anyone else has witnessed the attacks. I'm surprised intelligence agencies are asserting this kind of thing publicly with any level of confidence and it makes me worried that it's only going to be used to rationalize war efforts.
- gpm 9y ago
  It's not clear that all the intelligence agencies have are binaries. They are in the business of collecting intelligence after all. It's completely possible for instance that they have an informant, have hacked the hackers computers, have access to very detailed network data allowing them to trace back where the malware is communicating to (not just the first hop), etc. On the flip side they also have a history of lying, and could well be motivated to say this in the absence of such reliable evidence (or even evidence suggesting something else).
tr1ck5t3r 9y ago
You cant choose your parents, most people cant choose their nation state, for thousands of years people have been believing in unproven allegations of supernatural beings that have been whittled down to one all seeing all knowing supernatural super being. Do you ever get the impression we are all living in a system that keeps us busy with smoke and mirrors? You cant go back in time to prove what some people did, even law enforcement in its various guises have difficulties sometimes in proving that before the court de jure, so who and what do you trust? Have you ever considered that what generates an emotional response in you, is just a phishing trip that could be used to control you? We all have to trust so much of our lives on other people doing their job to the best of our abilities, how do you choose to spend your time trusting what? Who is going to go through an open source code base and check every line? Or do you hand over your hard earned cash and trust someone else like say Microsoft to do the job well? The virtues of open source code versus close sourced code is an interesting experiment on human behaviour.
fdik 9y ago
Or deep, deep sarcasm.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
atemerev 9y ago
You could fly to Moscow, but what you could see here was a far cry from a normal life of a Soviet citizen. At the same time, anti-Soviet propaganda also took many things wrong. Truth always takes a personal effort to discover; it can't be spoon-fed by the New York Times, or Pravda, or Facebook.
- blfr 9y ago
  What did anti-Soviet propaganda "take wrong"? Even after reading Bukowski, Solzhenitsyn, and the Black Book of Communism, I find it hard to imagine an atrocity which communists didn't commit. And not as isolated incident of abuse of power, usually on a mass scale. They liked their genocides like they liked their mines and factories -- huge. Not to mention the economic system of constant shortages where you had to bribe everyone, including the meat store clerk.
  - baursak 9y ago
    > They liked their genocides like they liked their mines and factories -- huge. Wut? How many huge genocides exactly did the Soviets commit? As in killing off entire ethnic groups? I can't really name any, although I can definitely name at least one that Americans committed, but we usually don't like to talk about that.
    - ForHackernews 9y ago
      This comment is pure whataboutism. For the record, the USSR under Stalin targeted Jews in purges and forced deportation to Sibera: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/125203/surviving-stalins-purges http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/125203/sur... The Holodomor is frequently cited as a genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question They also targeted 'kulaks' for deportation and/or extermination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
    - monort 9y ago
      During 30s and 40s they deported a lot of ethnic groups. Large percent (as much as 40%) died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union#Ethnic_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...
paradite 9y ago
You can in fact fly to North Korea, as thousands of people are doing every year. Or you can see what's happening through others who actually travelled there, like this photographer: https://www.dprk360.com https://www.dprk360.com
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Just don't take any unofficial souvenirs...
ozo 9y ago
>that only a domain expert with highly specialized experience Correct me if I'm wrong, but WannaCry isn't highly sophisticated. It weaponizes already known vulnerabilities to exploit soft targets on a large, but unsophisticated scale (because most of the victims are soft targets in terms of computer/network security). Ransomware is not a new idea either. Combining these things (known exploits, soft targets, ransomware) doesn't require genius or _highly_ specialized domain knowledge, hard to acquire intelligence or huge amounts of resources (labor or money). Any state capable of consistently spending a couple million dollars per year on a team for offensive security operations could, I suppose, pull this off.
- abeyer 9y ago
  The quote, with the words you elided was: > that only a domain expert with highly specialized experience could even recognize Notably, it's about the expertise needed to recognize and identify the attack, not to launch it.
- zxcmx 9y ago
  > any nation state... Or one of many different groups of people who can do computers.
- nwah1 9y ago
  True. And if we want to get conspiratorial, we should just blame all the viruses on Symantec.
finolex1 9y ago
I share your skepticism as well, but I wouldn't be too dismissive of North Korean Cyber capabilities either. They do have a specialized cyber warfare unit, handpick and train their soldiers extremely intensively (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/02/north-korea-hack-sony-pictures-brad-pitt-fury https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/02/north-kor...). Their performances in other international competitions, like the International Math Olympiad (https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=PRK https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=PRK), also indicates that they have the ability to do so if they wish to. Developing cyberwarfare capabilities seems like a relatively low cost (compared to developing ballistic missiles at least), low risk investment, with a potentially large payoff, so I would be surprised if they didn't try to develop these skills. Of course, all evidence tying N.Korea to this specific attack is circumstantial and almost impossible to definitively prove unless they admit it and show proof themselves.
- pulse7 9y ago
  Regarding "Their performances in ... International Math Olympiad": they were disqualified many times. I was at IMO in Istanbul in 1993 and they were disqualified, becuase they cheated (their official translator provided them solutions to the problems and it was discovered). So it may be possible that these "performances" don't indicate any such ability...
  - somecontext 9y ago
    For some context, it is relatively easy to cheat at the IMO if a team wants to do so. See for example this thread: https://www.quora.com/How-did-North-Korea-cheat-in-the-IMO-in-1991-and-2010 https://www.quora.com/How-did-North-Korea-cheat-in-the-IMO-i... It is my understanding that plenty of people do not believe North Korea cheated in 2010 (and also, plenty of people believe that other specific teams have cheated in specific years). Furthermore, it is my understanding that the North Korean team leader in recent years has not seen the problems before the contest (relying instead on the South Korean translation of the problems), thus removing the most obvious mechanism of cheating. Unfortunately, I do not know of a public source of this information and accordingly I have not verified it myself.
misja111 9y ago
It's good to have some skepticism, but I wouldn't underestimate North Korea's technical capabilities. After all they have been able to build an atom bomb, that's an accomplishment that is far more complicated than writing a computer worm.
- dingaling 9y ago
  Creating a nuclear explosive is more of a routine engineering challenge, rather than intellectual. Any nation with (1) 1950s-level engineering capability and (2) money or will can do it. To badly paraphrase a Manhattan Project scientist, from memory: "there are lots of ways to create a nuclear explosion and no matter which one we try they all seem to work" Miniaturised nukes are much, much more complicated and seem to require 1990s+ levels of physics, computer modelling and engineering.
- nv-vn 9y ago
  It's not that they wouldn't be able to. It's that proving it was them is damn near impossible. The claim that it's DEFINITELY THEM is just so hard to put any real substance behind that it just appears to be fictitious. The amount of proof that you could find in a single binary is very limited, and even that stuff could be faked on purpose. To say that it must, 100%, without a doubt, be of North Korean origin is about as foolproof as any other conspiracy theory.
SamUK96 9y ago
So, very cut down, you're saying that the US are implicating North Korea because they know they can, because they think that "normal civilian joes" don't know anything about NK? I'de say it's highly likely too, but what we need to find out is why would the US deep-state do this? Is there a specific motive for the US deep-state haphazardly implicating NK, other than, just maybe, the NSA got their hands on some evidence that we aren't aware of?
- DennisP 9y ago
  I can think of some motivations: - NK is developing longer-range ICBMs, and relations with the US have been deteriorating; recently, in response to a Trump tweet, NK threatened to drop a nuke on NYC [1]. Nobody in the administration is going to complain if NK takes a propaganda hit. - The NSA has been taking a lot of blame for WannaCry, and pointing fingers at NK diverts some of that blame. [1] http://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-attack-new-york-nuclear-missile-claim-624662 http://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-attack-new-york-nuclear-...
  - josteink 9y ago
    > The NSA has been taking a lot of blame for WannaCry, and pointing fingers at NK diverts some of that blame. Which is the exact reason I wouldn't trust any NSA-provided news about the origins of WannaCry more than I trust an average warez-site.
- michaelt 9y ago
  It doesn't need to be "the deep state" or "the US" - all it needs to be is one guy somewhere in government. For all we know, this could have been leaked by Joe the North Korea analyst to raise his profile and increase his status.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >I'de say it's highly likely too, but what we need to find out is why would the US deep-state do this? Budget. If they can spin this as a national security matter rather than a criminal matter they get the money rather than the FBI cybercrimes division. NK specifically has the advantage that nobody will believe them and there is no political fallout from accusing them.
doktrin 9y ago
> Now, the enemy that "we have always been at war with" ... is attacking us with secret cyber weapons that only a domain expert with highly specialized experience could even recognize, much less qualify. WannaCry is a wormable implementation of a leaked NSA exploit. Maybe not "trivial", but this wasn't exactly Stuxnet. I frankly don't share the knee-jerk skepticism of many in this comment section, and certainly not based on the DPRK's alleged incompetence : this attack is well within their capability.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  >this attack is well within their capability And the asymmetric nature of cyber warfare is a perfect fit for a small, marginalized state looking to destabilize everyone else.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  Is skepticism not inherently necessary when it comes to securing computer systems?
deadmik3 9y ago
not to mention the recent leaks that show it's possible for the CIA (or for that matter, any advanced intelligence agency) to "fake their tracks" and blame cyber attacks on other countries
pavpanchekha 9y ago
Friends of mine have been to North Korea, one of them to teach for a quarter at PUST (so not as a tourist). By their telling, even with a constant military guard, it is about as poor as we've been told. Of course, my friend did not see slave labor or criminal camps, but then flying to Moscow wouldn't let you tour gulags either. Some Americans do "tour" the North Korean prison system, just like with the Soviet one back in the day, and their experiences seem similar. Seems unlikely that they eat children, though, and I'm not sure I've heard anything about priest burnings their, though of course religion is mostly banned. This is of course a personal take and using sources you don't have access to—so use however much salt you feel necessary—but it seems that most assessments of life inside North Korea by international organizations are pretty on-the-mark.
cmurf 9y ago
> The only rational response to this is deep, deep skepticism. Do you apply the same statement to all world religions? At least that would be consistent, but it is also starting out of the gate with a very hefty dose of hubris. It is more reasonable to respond to the article as, just some for-profit paper's entertainment piece. It's reasonable to assert that claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. It's reasonable to criticize the U.S. government for an excess of secrecy, an overuse of classification. In 1959 the DoD had 12 meter resolution spy satellites. And 0.6 meter resolution spy satellites by the early 1980's. Those captures were never released nor leaked to the public contemporaneously, it would be decades before it was declassified and released. But let's take your "only rational response" is skepticism, and apply binary logic to the outcomes just to keep it simple: you believe the report is 100% true, you believe the report is 100% false. Let's take the false case. That necessarily commits you to the NSA being either incompetent or malevolent. If the NSA, with its vast resources, is engaging in either gross negligence or is malevolent, that means contemplation of the higher likelihood of deaths of millions: negligence or malevolence does not reduce the risk of death, for sure. And now you're confronted with rebel's dilemma as NSA is a domestic threat. What you do by saying the only rational response is skepticism, is commit yourself, morally and ethically, to arriving at certainty. Not hand waving that the burden is on others. You just placed the burden on yourself.
tripzilch 9y ago
Well that and what is the point if it were actually true? The NSA oops dropped a ton of cyberweapons on the streets and they would have gotten away with it, if not for those meddling kids .. kims .. well. Of course not, some other meddling kids would have wreaked havoc abusing the dangerous tech they didn't secure. Whose fault is this really? The damage was done the moment they lost control of that software. It could have been North Korea, some criminal gang, scriptkiddies, another country ... and that's bad and they'd be bad. But if you're a country that got hit by this ransomware you're not thinking "ow darn those North Koreans at it again" you know very well it was the NSA's fuckup, and if it hadn't been NK, someone else would have caused a large amount of damage using that tech in one way or another. They've been warned about the dangers of their inability to keep cyberweapons secure for years. Maybe from within the US for those who are somehow still rooting for the NSA, pointing fingers at one of the usual suspects is ... satisfying? But from outside it just looks childish. What I'm seeing is other people doing the cleanup, dealing with the aftermath, and what's the NSA doing? Fingerpointing. What does this gain anyone?
pmarreck 9y ago
One could not pick a more well-deserving country to practice their military (or military posturing) on, though

by rsync 9y ago

spullara 9y ago

They are also launching ballistic missiles so maybe we should worry a little bit. Also: https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/04/5-eye-opening-documentaries-about-north-korea.html https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/04/5-eye-opening...

sdfjlkjsdf7 9y ago

Agreed. Right off the bat, which I applaud in a way, they describe the strength of their argument. It's not very convincing. "...according to U.S. intelligence officials. The assessment, which was issued internally last week and has not been made public, is based on an analysis of tactics, techniques and targets that point with “moderate confidence” to North Korea’s spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, according to an individual familiar with the report." Which US IO? Not released publicly? That's handy. Which tactics, techniques and targets? Oh right, not public. Can we get examples of "moderate confidence?" What's high and low look like? Which individual? Much truth has come from leaks like this, but also a lot of smoke and mirrors. This could be a WH ploy to gin up reasons to target NK, for example.

problems 9y ago

Indeed, especially given that it takes so little information to fool such a metric. I'd go so far as to say that it's almost guaranteed that another nation state or even dedicated group of individuals could feasibly do it. There's just too little information to work off when all you have are a few binaries - with functions that can be trivially copied and modified at a binary level or reverse engineered and recompiled to similar binaries combined with some VPN IP addresses and a few assorted bits of information about attack patterns which are trivial to copy if anyone else has witnessed the attacks. I'm surprised intelligence agencies are asserting this kind of thing publicly with any level of confidence and it makes me worried that it's only going to be used to rationalize war efforts.

gpm 9y ago
It's not clear that all the intelligence agencies have are binaries. They are in the business of collecting intelligence after all. It's completely possible for instance that they have an informant, have hacked the hackers computers, have access to very detailed network data allowing them to trace back where the malware is communicating to (not just the first hop), etc. On the flip side they also have a history of lying, and could well be motivated to say this in the absence of such reliable evidence (or even evidence suggesting something else).

tr1ck5t3r 9y ago

You cant choose your parents, most people cant choose their nation state, for thousands of years people have been believing in unproven allegations of supernatural beings that have been whittled down to one all seeing all knowing supernatural super being. Do you ever get the impression we are all living in a system that keeps us busy with smoke and mirrors? You cant go back in time to prove what some people did, even law enforcement in its various guises have difficulties sometimes in proving that before the court de jure, so who and what do you trust? Have you ever considered that what generates an emotional response in you, is just a phishing trip that could be used to control you? We all have to trust so much of our lives on other people doing their job to the best of our abilities, how do you choose to spend your time trusting what? Who is going to go through an open source code base and check every line? Or do you hand over your hard earned cash and trust someone else like say Microsoft to do the job well? The virtues of open source code versus close sourced code is an interesting experiment on human behaviour.

fdik 9y ago

Or deep, deep sarcasm.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

atemerev 9y ago

You could fly to Moscow, but what you could see here was a far cry from a normal life of a Soviet citizen. At the same time, anti-Soviet propaganda also took many things wrong. Truth always takes a personal effort to discover; it can't be spoon-fed by the New York Times, or Pravda, or Facebook.

blfr 9y ago
What did anti-Soviet propaganda "take wrong"? Even after reading Bukowski, Solzhenitsyn, and the Black Book of Communism, I find it hard to imagine an atrocity which communists didn't commit. And not as isolated incident of abuse of power, usually on a mass scale. They liked their genocides like they liked their mines and factories -- huge. Not to mention the economic system of constant shortages where you had to bribe everyone, including the meat store clerk.
- baursak 9y ago
  > They liked their genocides like they liked their mines and factories -- huge. Wut? How many huge genocides exactly did the Soviets commit? As in killing off entire ethnic groups? I can't really name any, although I can definitely name at least one that Americans committed, but we usually don't like to talk about that.
  - ForHackernews 9y ago
    This comment is pure whataboutism. For the record, the USSR under Stalin targeted Jews in purges and forced deportation to Sibera: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/125203/surviving-stalins-purges http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/125203/sur... The Holodomor is frequently cited as a genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question They also targeted 'kulaks' for deportation and/or extermination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
  - monort 9y ago
    During 30s and 40s they deported a lot of ethnic groups. Large percent (as much as 40%) died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union#Ethnic_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...

paradite 9y ago

You can in fact fly to North Korea, as thousands of people are doing every year. Or you can see what's happening through others who actually travelled there, like this photographer: https://www.dprk360.com https://www.dprk360.com

jessaustin 9y ago
Just don't take any unofficial souvenirs...

ozo 9y ago

>that only a domain expert with highly specialized experience Correct me if I'm wrong, but WannaCry isn't highly sophisticated. It weaponizes already known vulnerabilities to exploit soft targets on a large, but unsophisticated scale (because most of the victims are soft targets in terms of computer/network security). Ransomware is not a new idea either. Combining these things (known exploits, soft targets, ransomware) doesn't require genius or _highly_ specialized domain knowledge, hard to acquire intelligence or huge amounts of resources (labor or money). Any state capable of consistently spending a couple million dollars per year on a team for offensive security operations could, I suppose, pull this off.

abeyer 9y ago
The quote, with the words you elided was: > that only a domain expert with highly specialized experience could even recognize Notably, it's about the expertise needed to recognize and identify the attack, not to launch it.
zxcmx 9y ago
> any nation state... Or one of many different groups of people who can do computers.
nwah1 9y ago
True. And if we want to get conspiratorial, we should just blame all the viruses on Symantec.

finolex1 9y ago

I share your skepticism as well, but I wouldn't be too dismissive of North Korean Cyber capabilities either. They do have a specialized cyber warfare unit, handpick and train their soldiers extremely intensively (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/02/north-korea-hack-sony-pictures-brad-pitt-fury https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/02/north-kor...). Their performances in other international competitions, like the International Math Olympiad (https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=PRK https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=PRK), also indicates that they have the ability to do so if they wish to. Developing cyberwarfare capabilities seems like a relatively low cost (compared to developing ballistic missiles at least), low risk investment, with a potentially large payoff, so I would be surprised if they didn't try to develop these skills. Of course, all evidence tying N.Korea to this specific attack is circumstantial and almost impossible to definitively prove unless they admit it and show proof themselves.

pulse7 9y ago
Regarding "Their performances in ... International Math Olympiad": they were disqualified many times. I was at IMO in Istanbul in 1993 and they were disqualified, becuase they cheated (their official translator provided them solutions to the problems and it was discovered). So it may be possible that these "performances" don't indicate any such ability...
- somecontext 9y ago
  For some context, it is relatively easy to cheat at the IMO if a team wants to do so. See for example this thread: https://www.quora.com/How-did-North-Korea-cheat-in-the-IMO-in-1991-and-2010 https://www.quora.com/How-did-North-Korea-cheat-in-the-IMO-i... It is my understanding that plenty of people do not believe North Korea cheated in 2010 (and also, plenty of people believe that other specific teams have cheated in specific years). Furthermore, it is my understanding that the North Korean team leader in recent years has not seen the problems before the contest (relying instead on the South Korean translation of the problems), thus removing the most obvious mechanism of cheating. Unfortunately, I do not know of a public source of this information and accordingly I have not verified it myself.

misja111 9y ago

It's good to have some skepticism, but I wouldn't underestimate North Korea's technical capabilities. After all they have been able to build an atom bomb, that's an accomplishment that is far more complicated than writing a computer worm.

dingaling 9y ago
Creating a nuclear explosive is more of a routine engineering challenge, rather than intellectual. Any nation with (1) 1950s-level engineering capability and (2) money or will can do it. To badly paraphrase a Manhattan Project scientist, from memory: "there are lots of ways to create a nuclear explosion and no matter which one we try they all seem to work" Miniaturised nukes are much, much more complicated and seem to require 1990s+ levels of physics, computer modelling and engineering.
nv-vn 9y ago
It's not that they wouldn't be able to. It's that proving it was them is damn near impossible. The claim that it's DEFINITELY THEM is just so hard to put any real substance behind that it just appears to be fictitious. The amount of proof that you could find in a single binary is very limited, and even that stuff could be faked on purpose. To say that it must, 100%, without a doubt, be of North Korean origin is about as foolproof as any other conspiracy theory.

SamUK96 9y ago

So, very cut down, you're saying that the US are implicating North Korea because they know they can, because they think that "normal civilian joes" don't know anything about NK? I'de say it's highly likely too, but what we need to find out is why would the US deep-state do this? Is there a specific motive for the US deep-state haphazardly implicating NK, other than, just maybe, the NSA got their hands on some evidence that we aren't aware of?

DennisP 9y ago
I can think of some motivations: - NK is developing longer-range ICBMs, and relations with the US have been deteriorating; recently, in response to a Trump tweet, NK threatened to drop a nuke on NYC [1]. Nobody in the administration is going to complain if NK takes a propaganda hit. - The NSA has been taking a lot of blame for WannaCry, and pointing fingers at NK diverts some of that blame. [1] http://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-attack-new-york-nuclear-missile-claim-624662 http://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-attack-new-york-nuclear-...
- josteink 9y ago
  > The NSA has been taking a lot of blame for WannaCry, and pointing fingers at NK diverts some of that blame. Which is the exact reason I wouldn't trust any NSA-provided news about the origins of WannaCry more than I trust an average warez-site.
michaelt 9y ago
It doesn't need to be "the deep state" or "the US" - all it needs to be is one guy somewhere in government. For all we know, this could have been leaked by Joe the North Korea analyst to raise his profile and increase his status.
crdoconnor 9y ago
>I'de say it's highly likely too, but what we need to find out is why would the US deep-state do this? Budget. If they can spin this as a national security matter rather than a criminal matter they get the money rather than the FBI cybercrimes division. NK specifically has the advantage that nobody will believe them and there is no political fallout from accusing them.

doktrin 9y ago

> Now, the enemy that "we have always been at war with" ... is attacking us with secret cyber weapons that only a domain expert with highly specialized experience could even recognize, much less qualify. WannaCry is a wormable implementation of a leaked NSA exploit. Maybe not "trivial", but this wasn't exactly Stuxnet. I frankly don't share the knee-jerk skepticism of many in this comment section, and certainly not based on the DPRK's alleged incompetence : this attack is well within their capability.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>this attack is well within their capability And the asymmetric nature of cyber warfare is a perfect fit for a small, marginalized state looking to destabilize everyone else.
wu-ikkyu 9y ago
Is skepticism not inherently necessary when it comes to securing computer systems?

deadmik3 9y ago

not to mention the recent leaks that show it's possible for the CIA (or for that matter, any advanced intelligence agency) to "fake their tracks" and blame cyber attacks on other countries

pavpanchekha 9y ago

Friends of mine have been to North Korea, one of them to teach for a quarter at PUST (so not as a tourist). By their telling, even with a constant military guard, it is about as poor as we've been told. Of course, my friend did not see slave labor or criminal camps, but then flying to Moscow wouldn't let you tour gulags either. Some Americans do "tour" the North Korean prison system, just like with the Soviet one back in the day, and their experiences seem similar. Seems unlikely that they eat children, though, and I'm not sure I've heard anything about priest burnings their, though of course religion is mostly banned. This is of course a personal take and using sources you don't have access to—so use however much salt you feel necessary—but it seems that most assessments of life inside North Korea by international organizations are pretty on-the-mark.

cmurf 9y ago

> The only rational response to this is deep, deep skepticism. Do you apply the same statement to all world religions? At least that would be consistent, but it is also starting out of the gate with a very hefty dose of hubris. It is more reasonable to respond to the article as, just some for-profit paper's entertainment piece. It's reasonable to assert that claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. It's reasonable to criticize the U.S. government for an excess of secrecy, an overuse of classification. In 1959 the DoD had 12 meter resolution spy satellites. And 0.6 meter resolution spy satellites by the early 1980's. Those captures were never released nor leaked to the public contemporaneously, it would be decades before it was declassified and released. But let's take your "only rational response" is skepticism, and apply binary logic to the outcomes just to keep it simple: you believe the report is 100% true, you believe the report is 100% false. Let's take the false case. That necessarily commits you to the NSA being either incompetent or malevolent. If the NSA, with its vast resources, is engaging in either gross negligence or is malevolent, that means contemplation of the higher likelihood of deaths of millions: negligence or malevolence does not reduce the risk of death, for sure. And now you're confronted with rebel's dilemma as NSA is a domestic threat. What you do by saying the only rational response is skepticism, is commit yourself, morally and ethically, to arriving at certainty. Not hand waving that the burden is on others. You just placed the burden on yourself.

tripzilch 9y ago

Well that and what is the point if it were actually true? The NSA oops dropped a ton of cyberweapons on the streets and they would have gotten away with it, if not for those meddling kids .. kims .. well. Of course not, some other meddling kids would have wreaked havoc abusing the dangerous tech they didn't secure. Whose fault is this really? The damage was done the moment they lost control of that software. It could have been North Korea, some criminal gang, scriptkiddies, another country ... and that's bad and they'd be bad. But if you're a country that got hit by this ransomware you're not thinking "ow darn those North Koreans at it again" you know very well it was the NSA's fuckup, and if it hadn't been NK, someone else would have caused a large amount of damage using that tech in one way or another. They've been warned about the dangers of their inability to keep cyberweapons secure for years. Maybe from within the US for those who are somehow still rooting for the NSA, pointing fingers at one of the usual suspects is ... satisfying? But from outside it just looks childish. What I'm seeing is other people doing the cleanup, dealing with the aftermath, and what's the NSA doing? Fingerpointing. What does this gain anyone?

pmarreck 9y ago

One could not pick a more well-deserving country to practice their military (or military posturing) on, though