BRILLIANT GENERAL ANNOUNCES TIMELY CLOSURE OF INTERNET TO PROTECT THE REVOLUTION FROM SPY PLOTS AND CULTURAL DECADENCE AT VISIT TO PAESONG DAIRY COMBINE, EXHORTING COW BRIGADE #3 TO GREATER MILK PRODUCTION IN CELEBRATION OF THE 25th ANNIIVERSARY OF DEAR LEADER KIM IL SUNG’S IMPLEMENTATION OF THE “MILITARY FIRST” POLICY GROWING SOCIALISM TOWARD THE EVENTUAL UNIFICATION AND DRIVING OUT OF PUPPET REGIME AND IMPERIALIST ELEMENTS.
Maybe the US, maybe China.
Sony - from the lack of prosecution for its rootkit to the demands it made to press outlets last week - is obviously used to being above the law.
Communism was once China’s highest ideal, where in the US it was democracy, capitalism and citizens’ rights. They’ve apparently agreed to meet half-way at authoritarian capitalism.
The attack on Sony is an attack on the emerging political system of both countries.
(Yes, that’s hyperbole. But nowhere near as much as I wish it were.)
We just can’t beat the real thing:
Pyongyang, December 21, Juche 103 (KCNA) — The Sony Pictures Entertainment, the biggest movie producer in the U.S., which produced the undesirable reactionary film “The Interview” daring hurt the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK and agitating even terrorism and had a plan to distribute it, was exposed to surprisingly sophisticated, destructive and threatening cyber warfare and has been thrown into a bottomless quagmire after suffering property losses worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
It’s the Internet, so here’s my probability graph:
Odds of it being random idiots? 99%
Odds of it being a concerted attack plan by a highly skilled government cyberstrike team: 1%
How reliable was NK’s 'net before this? I’m assuming they’ve had outages before; is this one unusually long or are we just paying more attention lately?
If it is an attack, it could just as easily be a couple of stoners in Norway as anyone else. 
Japhroaigs corollary: chances of random idiots online frequenting unruly Chan’s? Six sigma likelihood.
That’s my thinking. Any group of internet hooligans who cannot take out North Korea’s network aren’t worth bothering about.
How big is their network…maybe somebody tripped over the patch cord…
If North Korea is to blame for the Sony hack because NK threatened Sony, then surely Sony is to blame for the attack on North Korea.
North Korea had the internet? I thought they had to go to the public library in Vladivostok.
Possibly the only place in the world that could lose internet access with hardly anybody noticing.
Someone on Twitter suggested that if the US really had it in for the DPRK we’d figure out a way for everyone in the whole country to get the Internet.
And they’re right. If we could parachute in thirty million solar powered satellite-internet tablet devices with tutorial software and links to stream South Korean soap operas and hope shopping channels, it would just be a matter of time.
Of course, thre’d probably be a horrible body count as the government tries to round up the things.
And here I thought Stefan’s paragraph was hard to parse!
Here’s where a certain amount of democracy trumps totalitarianism every time. How many skilled hackers does NK have? Hundreds? Thousands? How many skilled hackers are there in the United States, who would find it amusing to, on their own, attack NK’s network? My entirely uneducated guess is somewhere in the mid to high hundreds of thousands. I’m not sure the government needs to do anything but point some private citizens toward NK and say “go see what you can do.”
(Of course, the other benefit of democracy is that the government can’t very well marshall such forces very easily – or control them very well. Which is why even democratic governments try their damnedest to neuter their own democracies.)
How was this done? A DDoS? Or maybe BGP shenanigans? What exactly is down?
Has anyone checked to see whether Sony Pictures has ever done business in North Korea?
Is it possible to do business in North Korea, at least if you’re not from China?
Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?
