The trail that led US officials to blame North Korea for the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agency scrambled to break into the well-guarded computer systems of a country considered one of the most impenetrable targets on earth.
FBI Director James Comey, today, said that the hackers who compromised Sony Pictures Entertainment usually used proxy servers to obfuscate their identity, but "several times they got sloppy."
Speaking today at an event at Fordham University in New York, Comey said, "Several times, either because they forgot or because of a technical problem, they connected directly and we could see that the IPs they were using ... were exclusively used by the North Koreans.
Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai noted his dismay at being the target of a notorious hack that sparked an international controversy between the US and North Korea.
Sony was "unfortunately the victim of one of the most vicious and malicious cyberattacks we've known certainly in recent history," Hirai said during a keynote presentation at this year's Consumer Electronics Show here.
The US is lobbing fresh sanctions against North Korea as a response to the cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment even as President Barack Obama's administration refuses to provide evidence of Pyongyang's involvement.
A strong counter-narrative to the official account of the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment has emerged in recent days, with the visage of the petulant North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, replaced by another, more familiar face: former Sony Pictures employees angry over their firing during a recent reorganization at the company.
The Sony Corporation’s PlayStation Network had connection problems for a fourth day since hackers attacked the video game network, and the company said on Sunday that service was gradually being restored.
The hacker activist group known as Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for disrupting both the PlayStation Network and Microsoft Corporation’s Xbox Live on Christmas Day. Service was restored to Xbox Live on Friday.
For years, we've pointed out that the giant "settlements" that the MPAA likes to announce with companies it declares illegal are little more than Hollywood-style fabrications. Cases are closed with big press releases throwing around huge settlement numbers, knowing full well that the sites in question don't have anywhere near that kind of money available. At the end of 2013, it got two of these, with IsoHunt agreeing to 'pay' $110 million and Hotfile agreeing to 'pay' $80 million. In both cases, we noted that there was no chance that those sums would ever get paid.
Sony Pictures issued a warning Sunday to news organizations against use of information leaked after a massive security breach at the studio.
In a sternly worded letter first reported by The New York Times, Sony Pictures attorney David Boies referred to the leaked Sony documents as "stolen information" and demands that those that may have already been downloaded not be reviewed and destroyed.
The FBI declined to name the source of the Sony Pictures hack during a U.S. Senate hearing on Wednesday.
"I won't touch on the attribution piece because we're still working very hard on that," said Joseph Demarest, assistant director of the FBI's cyber division. Demarest's comment was in reply to questions from Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) during a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee.
Security firm Kaspersky Labs reports that a new sample of the Destover malware—the malware family used in the recent attack on the networks of Sony Pictures—has been found bearing a valid digital signature that could help it sneak past security screening on some Windows systems. And that digital signature is courtesy of a certificate stolen from Sony Pictures.
