According to CNN, the FBI may have misled the president about who was responsible for hacking into Sony’s computers:
Sure, North Korea’s government despises the movie “The Interview.”
But when its propagandists say it did not hack Sony Pictures before the original release date of the flick that satirizes dictator Kim Jong-un, they might just be telling the truth.
Some U.S. cyber experts say the evidence the FBI has presented to attempt to incriminate hackers working for the communist regime is not enough to pin the blame on Pyongyang.
“It’s clear to us, based on both forensic and other evidence we’ve collected, that unequivocally they are not responsible for orchestrating or initiating the attack on Sony,” said Sam Glines, who runs the cybersecurity company Norse.
The FBI has said that code in the malware used by a group called “Guardians of Peace” (GoP) in the attack on Sony is similar to code used by North Korea in other attacks.
But that code was leaked a long time ago, experts say. Any hacker anywhere in the world could have used it.
This wouldn’t be a particularly important possibility except for the fact that the administration isn’t exactly denying launching a retaliatory cyberattack on the North Koreans which shut down their internet. In fact, the North Koreans just experienced another massive shutdown of both their internet and 3G cell phone service. This led to a nasty incident in which “an unidentified spokesman for North Korea’s National Defense Commission told the official Korean Central News Agency, “Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest.””
I hope I do not need to remind you of a few rather important facts.
North Korea:
1. Has nuclear weapons.
2. Has a leader who appears to be insane.
3. Has a paranoid and bellicose military.
4. Patrols a Demilitarized Zone that separates it from tens of thousands of American soldiers.
5. Has a war doctrine that depends on attacking first and destroying Seoul, the capital of South Korea with a population of ten million people.
Under these circumstances, it would seem just a tad irresponsible to wrongly accuse the North Koreans of committing a cyberattack and then to knock out their ears and eyes so that they cannot know if they are about to experience a military invasion. Something like that could lead the North Koreans to panic and launch an attack of their own, possibly including a nuclear weapon.
If the FBI misinformed the president about the strength of their evidence, they just risked getting hundreds of thousands if not millions of people killed.
It would seem kind of vital to find out if that is really what just happened.
