![]() ![]() ![]() North Korea has denied involvement in the Sony hack, but has welcomed it as a "righteous deed" carried out by someone upset about a film that encourages "a terrorist act while hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership". In it, Seth Rogen and James Franco play assassins hired by the CIA to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. North Korea complained to the United Nations in July about a Sony movie called The Interview that is due for release over the Christmas period. The malware used to attack Sony resembles malware used in 2012 on an attack that disabled 30,000 computers in Saudi Arabia's national oil company, Aramco, and there is speculation that it and the Sony attack may have effectively been commercial sovereign sub-contracts, with the Sony contract originating in North Korea. Sony appears to be an example of a newer trend, however: single company, and perhaps single issue, attacks by state-sponsored freelance hacker groups. The Stuxnet worm that infected control systems and disabled Iranian nuclear centrifuges in 2010 is one that required jaw-dropping technical prowess. There are other examples of traditional, technically brilliant sovereign hacks. There are no reported infections in the United States. Regin is so sophisticated it was almost certainly created with state assistance: Russia and Saudi Arabia are the countries with the most Regin computer infections. China's hacking of Western government government sites and strategically important companies was documented in 2013, for example, and last month cyber-security experts revealed the existence of "Regin", malware that has apparently been reporting from inside government and corporate computers since at least 2008. Nation states have spied on each other since nation states have existed, and their intelligence-gathering has moved online as the use of computers and the internet has expanded. The material that has created a public relations meltdown for Sony has been drawn from a 40-gigabyte data dump by the hackers, and it is not clear yet how deep a hole Sony is in: the hackers claim to have stolen 100 terrabytes from the company. In one of them, and angry Hollywood producer tells Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal that Angelina Jolie is a "minimally talented, spoiled brat". Highly embarrassing email exchanges involving top Sony Pictures executives have also been published. ![]()
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