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The NSA has linked the WannaCry computer worm to North Korea

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The NSA has linked the WannaCry computer worm to North Korea

#141

Post by random314 »

mc32 wrote: post #62
1001101 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Watching the Noam Chomsky documentary, Manufacturing Consent, on YouTube really opened my eyes to this phenomena. Based on what I have observed recently, I think the decision was made some time ago on this, and we're being told what to think.

It's good to be skeptical but I think when you have preponderance of evidence in one way, it's not unreasonable to reach a conclusion. Remember Noam was the same guy who for political reasons did not want to believe Pol Pot was mowing through millions despite large amounts of information filtering out of the country corroborating the atrocities others claimed were taking place. Additionally, there is no need to "manu…

> Remember Noam was the same guy who for political reasons did not want to believe Pol Pot was mowing through millions

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-07-01/brull---the-boring-tru...

If the best criticism of Chomsky is from 40 years ago, and about Pol Pot - a person Chomsky believes is a mass murderer, I think Chomsky is doing quite well.

> Additionally, there is no need to "manufacture consent" as only a very small minority would object to any action against N Korea at this point in time.

Consent has already been manufactured!

Re: The NSA has linked the WannaCry computer worm to North Korea

#144

Post by Buge »

joshfraser wrote: post #92

It's ~impossible to prove who's behind any attack these days given code-reuse, false flags & TOR. Anyone who claims to be able to do it reliably, is bullshitting you and likely has an agenda.

They clearly had a fluent Chinese speaker working with them. https://www.flashpoint-intel.com/blog/linguistic-analysis-wa...

Of course I'm sure the NSA has a number of fluent Chinese speakers.

Re: The NSA has linked the WannaCry computer worm to North Korea

#145

Post by matank »

openasocket wrote: post #21

OK, so I know this is going to come up in the comments, but this is not remotely a baseless allegation. The Lazarus group (one of the names for the DPRK-associated APT group) is somewhat well known and is quite sophisticated. This is the same group that hacked Sony a few years back. And to preempt people who are going to chime in with "Sony was just some insider leaking data" there is extensive evidence showing it wa…

I am curious about how big these groups are? 10-100-1000 people? Seems like a lot of stuff has to come together for a "win". It's hard to imagine experts sitting around the whole day finding this motivating work.

Re: The NSA has linked the WannaCry computer worm to North Korea

#147

Post by 1001101 »

mc32 wrote: post #86
1001101 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did people think highly of Saddam in 2003?

There was lots of skepticism but in the end because of lack of good humint a lot of weight was placed on his behavior (his continued pretense/bluffing for the purpose of not disclosing weakness to Iran), the international community with the US at the lead reached a faulty conclusion. With regard to DPRK S Korea has great humint and we have multiple defectors corroborating each other (whereas Iraq there was basically…

I Can see how saddam's brand of pan-Arab socialist nationalism combined with Iraq's oil wealth could be irksome in some circles.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that NK presents a real and present danger. A continuous stream of bellicose rhetoric combined with progress on ICBMs and a current nuclear + LEO satellite = EMP capability troubles me. I don't deny the facts there. A change of course seems perfectly reasonable, necessary, and prudent. I will celebrate liberty for the North Korean people, and Kim's return to dust. My feeling is that the least palatable options to thinking and feeling human beings are the most probable at this point (for various reasons), hence the need for the narrative.

It just seems to me like a bug in our democracy that we don't get a clear accounting, representation, and participation in grave decisions like these, and I hope someday that bug gets patched.

Re: The NSA has linked the WannaCry computer worm to North Korea

#148

Post by mc32 »

random314 wrote: post #141
mc32 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good to be skeptical but I think when you have preponderance of evidence in one way, it's not unreasonable to reach a conclusion. Remember Noam was the same guy who for political reasons did not want to believe Pol Pot was mowing through millions despite large amounts of information filtering out of the country corroborating the atrocities others claimed were taking place. Additionally, there is no need to "manu…

> Remember Noam was the same guy who for political reasons did not want to believe Pol Pot was mowing through millions http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-07-01/brull---the-boring-tru... If the best criticism of Chomsky is from 40 years ago, and about Pol Pot - a person Chomsky believes is a mass murderer, I think Chomsky is doing quite well. > Additionally, there is no need to "manufacture consent" as only a very small…

>If the best criticism of Chomsky is from 40 years ago

He's a politically, nay, ideologically motivated individual --i.e. he presents his version of a story to which there could be multiple sides with multiple interpretations, but his is "right".

You can witness the same again when he more recently shrugged off 9-11 because he said, oh, well, the US committed similar atrocity by bombing a pill factory in the Sudan. He can be downright intellectually lazy when it's opportune.

Oh, and he also sympathized with Milosevic. Why? Oh, well, because he saw him as the one guy in the Balkans who was anti-American. Yup, he sympathized with Milosevic. that's your Chomsky.

>Consent has already been manufactured!

If you call that manufactured consent then that term has lost all meaningful distinction.

Re: The NSA has linked the WannaCry computer worm to North Korea

#149

Post by problems »

rsync wrote: post #129

The only rational response to this is deep, deep skepticism. In the old days of the USSR, while very difficult, it was at least conceivable that you could just fly to moscow and see if they were eating their children there or burning priests or god knows whatever else. There was a natural limit to the deception that could occur and further a normal person could make conclusions about the things they saw with their ow…

Indeed, especially given that it takes so little information to fool such a metric. I'd go so far as to say that it's almost guaranteed that another nation state or even dedicated group of individuals could feasibly do it.

There's just too little information to work off when all you have are a few binaries - with functions that can be trivially copied and modified at a binary level or reverse engineered and recompiled to similar binaries combined with some VPN IP addresses and a few assorted bits of information about attack patterns which are trivial to copy if anyone else has witnessed the attacks. I'm surprised intelligence agencies are asserting this kind of thing publicly with any level of confidence and it makes me worried that it's only going to be used to rationalize war efforts.

Re: The NSA has linked the WannaCry computer worm to North Korea

#150

Post by tr1ck5t3r »

rsync wrote: post #129

The only rational response to this is deep, deep skepticism. In the old days of the USSR, while very difficult, it was at least conceivable that you could just fly to moscow and see if they were eating their children there or burning priests or god knows whatever else. There was a natural limit to the deception that could occur and further a normal person could make conclusions about the things they saw with their ow…

You cant choose your parents, most people cant choose their nation state, for thousands of years people have been believing in unproven allegations of supernatural beings that have been whittled down to one all seeing all knowing supernatural super being.

Do you ever get the impression we are all living in a system that keeps us busy with smoke and mirrors?

You cant go back in time to prove what some people did, even law enforcement in its various guises have difficulties sometimes in proving that before the court de jure, so who and what do you trust?

Have you ever considered that what generates an emotional response in you, is just a phishing trip that could be used to control you?

We all have to trust so much of our lives on other people doing their job to the best of our abilities, how do you choose to spend your time trusting what? Who is going to go through an open source code base and check every line? Or do you hand over your hard earned cash and trust someone else like say Microsoft to do the job well? The virtues of open source code versus close sourced code is an interesting experiment on human behaviour.

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