Briefing

What the hell, Greenpeace? Seriously, what the hell? Who considered this a good idea?

"What do we want? Dead cops." A guy shot his girlfriend in Baltimore, then -- understanding that his days were numbered -- traveled up to New York and took out a couple of New York, killing himself soon after. He seems to have killed the police officers as a protest against the Michael Brown and Eric Garner outrages.

From the Moderate Voice blog:

Many protesters in past days were involved in shouting “What do we want?” The answer to same was: “Dead cops.”

Nobody will claim that a vengeance killing of this sort is morally justified. But before we enter into an argument over morality, let's talk physics. As in: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." The grand questions of right and wrong, justifiable versus non-justifiable, good tactics vs. bad tactics -- all of these are questions we must debate. But first and foremost, we have to understand the physics involved here..

Sony hack alternatives. While most of the mainstream media has gone along with the FBI's assessment, some still question the "blame North Korea" theory. For example:

1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesn’t exhibit any of the classic comprehension mistakes you actually expect to see in “Konglish”. i.e it reads to me like an English speaker pretending to be bad at writing English.

2. The fact that the code was written on a PC with Korean locale & language actually makes it less likely to be North Korea. Not least because they don’t speak traditional “Korean” in North Korea, they speak their own dialect and traditional Korean is forbidden. This is one of the key things that has made communication with North Korean refugees difficult. I would find the presence of Chinese far more plausible.

It’s clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sony’s internal architecture and access to key passwords.

The attackers only latched onto “The Interview” after the media did – the film was never mentioned by GOP right at the start of their campaign. It was only after a few people started speculating in the media that this and the communication from DPRK “might be linked” that suddenly it became linked.

Framing a nation that nobody likes is a great way of deflecting investigators.

Also see here:

So far, all that I have seen personally posted online and in the news that counts as “evidence” has been inferential and certainly not worth spit in a court of law, never mind even in a mock court taking place in a 5th grade classroom!

If you need a detailed chronology of events, try this. Here's an interesting point:

All analysis to date suggests the malware was not unique to Sony, and may have been used several times before. Trying to suggest that malware that evades “industry-standard antivirus software” is “unprecedented” is ridiculous. Antivirus software routinely fails to identify malware due to the archaic signature-based model they use.

I would like to offer a new suspect: Someone in the corporate security industry. I'm not saying that HBGary/ManTech did it...but: Do you remember when we found out that HBGary was using the free AVG antivirus on their own computers, even though they were selling their own anti-Malware protection to corporate clients for huge amounts of money? Some people suspected a scam. Some people -- not me, mind you, but some people -- suspected that HBGary simply repackaged a standard antivirus and sold it to corporate clients as something big, important, powerful and expensive.

Who benefits from the Sony hack? Well, one possible beneficiary would be the first company who approaches Sony and says these words: "Your previous approach to security was pathetic. We can protect you. We have proprietary methods that go far beyond standard measures. But it's gonna cost you..."