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The New York Times is reporting the FBI's director is publicly stating that the bureau has no doubt the North Koreans are behind the Sony hacking attack:
James B. Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on Wednesday that no one should doubt that the North Korean government was behind the destructive attack on Sony’s computer network last fall.
Mr. Comey said he had “high confidence” in the F.B.I.’s quick determination that North Korea was behind the attack. He said skeptics in the Internet security world who have suggested other theories for who was responsible did not have all the information he does.
The F.B.I. director said national security concerns limited just how far law enforcement officials could go in revealing evidence that points to North Korea. But at a conference on cybersecurity in New York, Mr. Comey offered some of the evidence the F.B.I. had found.
One of the telltale pieces of evidence, he said, were a few I.P., or Internet Protocol, addresses that could be traced directly to North Korea. Mr. Comey said members of the group claiming responsibility for the hacking — Guardians of Peace — did a good job concealing their identities but slipped up in some cases.
"They used proxy servers to disguise” the trail of evidence, Mr. Comey said. “But sometimes they got sloppy.”
Should we believe him? After all, he is the FBI director, not exactly a source of truthful information.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Friday January 09 2015, @04:59PM
So hang on a minute. There's one very important questions nobody has answered. If this was North Korea, what was their motivation? Why did they do it?
I mean OK, they were pissed about The Interview, right? But they didn't stop the release of the movie. And their attacks didn't seem to focus on that, they dumped a bunch of unrelated info to the internet, tried to shut down Sony offices, but I haven't seen much specific to that movie. If they were trying to stop the movie, they were clearly trying to do so through broad intimidation. A show of force. But you can't do a show of force in secret, that kind of defeats the purpose. They want Sony and the USA to be afraid of their great power, but they claim it's *someone else's* power? And they then offer to help investigate that person? I can understand that they might not be able to directly admit it, since that might be an act of war, but that just means they don't want it to be *provable* that they were behind it. They'd still want people to *believe* they were behind it.
So in what universe does that make sense? These aren't the actions of someone looking to intimidate, these aren't the actions of someone trying to demonstrate their power. These are the actions of someone who just wants to screw with Sony. That's not generally how a military would operate. Even one controlled by a fanatical dictator.