The last time people got this crazy about a hack, Kevin Mitnick was thrown in solitary confinement for months because they thought he could "whistle nuclear launch codes into prison telephones". 2600 made the documentary about it, Freedom Downtime, and I strongly recommend watching it if you never have.
So what if North Korea did it (of course I'm skeptical of this, anyone with a computer can conduct the same activities, with the motivator of trolling the entire world for fun). It's not a big deal, it's not something that requires US presidential intervention. It's not even remotely as big of a deal as the CIA torture report that just came out. The CIA report threatens our legitimacy as a world power. The Sony hack just costs a corporation some money, maybe (free publicity FTW). Big. Deal.
If this is the worst a hacker can do, I'd love to see all future wars replaced with hacking. I'll take that over agent orange and torture any day.
This sad, sick notion that hackers are terrorist enemy #1 and this is the most important thing governments should be working on is, like this movie will probably be, shitty fiction, a self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuated by Hollywood in movies like War Games that make it look like we're all going to be nuked thousands of times if we don't stop the Hacker menace. Help me change the media's perception of hacking before we start throwing more whistleblowers and e-graffiti artists in prison.
TLDR: Sony got hacked, too bad, learn a lesson and fix your computer security, let's not start WW3 over it shall we?
>The CIA report threatens our legitimacy as a world power. The Sony hack just costs a corporation some money, maybe (free publicity FTW). Big. Deal.
It is a big deal actually. Sony and these movie theaters taught the world that US businesses are so risk averse that they will give into any threat - credible or not. The crazies will now come out of the woodwork. Not every business will give in, but the volume of threats and the disruption they cause will vastly increase.
A foreign dictator just told the US population that it isn't allowed to see a movie he doesn't like (false flag conspiracy theories aside - sometimes things are exactly what they appear to be). I am not sure how anyone can think this isn't a big deal worthy of presidential intervention.
I don't think script kiddies could do this size of a hack, especially considering the amount of data involved and stay under the radar this long. If this is what a script kiddie is capable of... then what is a real hacker capable of?
No one was saying that this was done by script kiddies, but IIRC there were monitors on Sony's network for suspicious activity, and they did flag some of the activity, but the relevant people were told to ignore it by Sony's 'security' team. (I imagine this means that they get lots of false-positives and were just too used to ignore the alerts?)
It seems like Sony did a lot of stuff wrong in the end but instead of owning up to the mistakes are going to claim that it was a terrorist attack on their syste .
Yeah of course because who cares if people get tortured, mass raped, cluster bombed and starved as long as we get to keep running our little startups, right?
Wars vs more script kiddies and you'd really choose the wars? I'm disgusted.
Although you've answered twice, you're still avoiding the question.
He asked you if you prefer war over script kiddies, and said he's disgusted that you seem to. I agree.
Do you or don't you prefer actual war (including torture, rape, cluster bombs, starvation, etc) over "cyber warfare" (including script kiddies, copyright violation, web site graffiti and defacement, leaked email and photos, cyber bullying, doxing, inappropriate use of apostrophes, etc)?
I wouldn't put doxing in the same category as "web site graffiti and defacement". It has the potential to be psychologically every bit as damaging as rape...
I'm sure Alfreda Bikowsky was psychologically damaged by being doxed as the key apologist and senior officer at the center of the CIA's torture scandals. But not as badly as the people who were physically damaged and killed by the torture she ordered and flew to witness because "She thought it would be cool to be in the room".
There is going to be no real war over this hacking that is pure fucking fantasy. This is all just shit threading so we can talk about torture and continue the reddit like circle jerk.
And all Sony had to do was regularly back up, encrypt and delete the emails off their servers. This is the prime thing motivating their actions and driving their fear. And protect sensitive documents better but that seems secondary.
Leaving an ever accumlating pile of embarassing communications for someone to steal and then extort you for is not a national security weakness.
I don't know about you, but my ability to search and retrieve emails from months or years ago is critical in my job. You make it sound like it's an obvious choice.
As peeters said, most organizations rely upon the historical volume of emails to operate effectively. This isn't a simple solution.
Add that a narrative around this story is that the hackers "spear phished" an IT admin. This is incredibly difficult to defend against for any organization (seriously -- for all of the browbeating against Sony on here -- it's all so simple -- I would argue that there are zero organizations that would withstand a concerted, targeted attack. Most would fall in a day). Not only did they purportedly co-opt a privileged account, they then sat on it for months.
Over months they could have changed policies, retrieved backups, and on and on.
When blaming Sony, everyone needs to remember that Snowden, a Dell contractor working at the NSA with limited access, took the King's Ransom from what is assumed to be the pinnacle of computer security and awareness.
So what if North Korea did it (of course I'm skeptical of this, anyone with a computer can conduct the same activities, with the motivator of trolling the entire world for fun). It's not a big deal, it's not something that requires US presidential intervention. It's not even remotely as big of a deal as the CIA torture report that just came out. The CIA report threatens our legitimacy as a world power. The Sony hack just costs a corporation some money, maybe (free publicity FTW). Big. Deal.
If this is the worst a hacker can do, I'd love to see all future wars replaced with hacking. I'll take that over agent orange and torture any day.
This sad, sick notion that hackers are terrorist enemy #1 and this is the most important thing governments should be working on is, like this movie will probably be, shitty fiction, a self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuated by Hollywood in movies like War Games that make it look like we're all going to be nuked thousands of times if we don't stop the Hacker menace. Help me change the media's perception of hacking before we start throwing more whistleblowers and e-graffiti artists in prison.
TLDR: Sony got hacked, too bad, learn a lesson and fix your computer security, let's not start WW3 over it shall we?