| Title | If the NSA Hacked North Korea First, Why Didn't They See the Sony Hack Coming? | |
| Date | Tuesday January 20 2015, @01:48PM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the look-over-your-shoulder dept. | ||
An article in der Spiegel on Friday reported that documents leaked by Snowden reveal the US government installed backdoor software into North Korea's computer systems years before the Sony hack ever happened:
The NSA used South Korea's established inroads to install malware on North Korean networks, which was able to provide enough evidence to pinpoint the nation as the source of the Sony hack, according to anonymous government officials. This leads to the question, if the NSA had enough intel, why wasn't it able to advise Sony of the attack ahead of time? Administration officials said that the "spear-phishing" attacks -- which entice e-mail users to download infected files -- didn't look out of the ordinary or raise any alarms. But those attacks allowed the hackers to steal a key system admin's credentials, which they used to carefully infiltrate the system, search out key files and eventually destroy or leak them.
The New York Times reported on Sunday (paywalled) the NSA used what they knew to help gather evidence against North Korea.
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printed from SoylentNews, If the NSA Hacked North Korea First, Why Didn't They See the Sony Hack Coming? on 2024-05-10 12:47:07