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Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

nytimes.com

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Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#161

Post by [deleted] »

Crito wrote: post #131
_delirium wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Norwegian Nobel Committee (which is a private organization which awards a private prize, despite having some members selected by Norwegian parliament) The Peace Prize is a bit closer to the Norwegian government than that. Alfred Nobel left that part of his will directly to the Norwegian Parliament, not to a private organization, and he tasked the Parliament with using the money to establish a peace prize. The P…

The current reality is that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is a private body, and it is not currently the role of Norwegian Parliament to dictate to it who they may or may not award prizes to. Nobel may not have set it up that way personally, but that is how it is currently set up.

[deleted]

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#162

Post by _delirium »

sondr3 wrote: post #132
_delirium wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Norwegian Nobel Committee (which is a private organization which awards a private prize, despite having some members selected by Norwegian parliament) The Peace Prize is a bit closer to the Norwegian government than that. Alfred Nobel left that part of his will directly to the Norwegian Parliament, not to a private organization, and he tasked the Parliament with using the money to establish a peace prize. The P…

But the Norwegian government has absolutely nothing to do with who gets the prize, which is the whole point here. The fact that China gets angry at Norway et al because of a committee in Norway gave the peace prize to someone almost nobody in China knows about is a bit petty.

The cabinet doesn't directly award the prize, no. But Parliament chooses the people who choose the prize. That seems like exercising a pretty strong degree of control over who gets the prize, as with any other committee appointed by Parliament. And worse, they are specifically political appointments, not an attempt at appointing a quasi-independent "body of experts". There was a move some decades ago to change the makeup so the committee would be comprised of independent experts, from e.g. the academic, NGO, or scientific sectors, and maybe even including non-Norwegians. But that was rejected, so the committee continues to be staffed exclusively by important politicians.

For example, the current committee has the following members: Thorbjørn Jagland (Labour Party), Kaci Kullmann Five (Conservatives), Inger-Marie Ytterhorn (Progress Party), Berit Reiss-Andersen (Labour Party), Gunnar Stålsett (Centre Party).

A slightly different way of putting it might be: the Nobel Prize is awarded jointly by the major political parties of Norway, via their chosen representatives.

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#163

Post by stevenrace »

skepxx wrote: post #74
otterley wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FBI's summary analysis is here: http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/update-on-so...

There's certainly some missing evidence in the FBI report. Regarding the IP's used, please have a read here: http://krypt3ia.wordpress.com/2014/12/20/fauxtribution/

FWIW the CERT ('US Computer Emergency Readiness Team') report on the 19th [1] delves a bit deeper into the exploit methods.

If you search for the MD5 hashes of the code you can find code snippets and incidents where such code was used in the past (hacking attempts at DHS, etc). Even though none of these were '0-days' or written by those with ties to NK, the attribution seems to be based on such code reuse.

[1] https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA14-353A

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#164

Post by [deleted] »

Crito wrote: post #131
_delirium wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Norwegian Nobel Committee (which is a private organization which awards a private prize, despite having some members selected by Norwegian parliament) The Peace Prize is a bit closer to the Norwegian government than that. Alfred Nobel left that part of his will directly to the Norwegian Parliament, not to a private organization, and he tasked the Parliament with using the money to establish a peace prize. The P…

The current reality is that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is a private body, and it is not currently the role of Norwegian Parliament to dictate to it who they may or may not award prizes to. Nobel may not have set it up that way personally, but that is how it is currently set up.

[deleted]

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#165

Post by JabavuAdams »

ForHackernews wrote: post #25
luftderfreiheit wrote: post #12

What fascinating times we live in. My interpretation of the general history of warfare is that countries agree on restraint once some situation has occurred that all sides agree should never happen again. Mustard gas in WWI, nuclear weapons in WWII... Hopefully this doesn't spiral out of control. It's not clear where the boundaries are that we don't want to cross.

I'd be pretty happy if governments all decided "cyberwarfare" was an acceptable substitute for the real thing. Nobody dies, some money is lost, some important people are embarrassed.

If the power grid goes down in Canada and the US in January, then people will die. If it stays down because turbines have been damaged, then lots of people will die.

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#166

Post by rtpg »

n09n wrote: post #136
darkstar999 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That twitter account is banned. What's to stop me from creating an "Anonymous" account and acting like "them"?

What is it with old people and their complete inability to understand Anonymous? If you did that, you wouldn't be acting like "them", you would be part of Anonymous.

the thing I don't get is it's literally in their name, that this is not a group but just some random people on the internet. The idea that it's one group just comes from how 4chan talks about anonymous people with slight lingo, making it sound like a group from an outsider.

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#167

Post by nnnnnnn »

graycat wrote: post #156

Well, NK likely does not have the best electric grid. So, maybe the problem was just their electric grid! Or maybe the problem was someone clicking on the wrong icon or push button in some system management software, maybe written in NK? But if the outage was from a DDoS from the USG, then I have to regard it as mostly a publicity stunt: That is, I have to believe that the NSA and CIA have much better control over ,…

North Korea uses Red Star OS[1], an operating system running on the Linux kernel and KDE 3, developed at the Korea Computer Center.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#168

Post by snogglethorpe »

Alupis wrote: post #124
knd775 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is publicly backing away from North Korea. They have said that they will not come to NK's aid if they do something stupid and get attacked.

> China is publicly backing away from North Korea It seems to be quite the opposite actually: > Any civilized world will oppose hacker attacks or terror threats. But a movie like ‘The Interview,’ which makes fun of the leader of an enemy of the U.S., is nothing to be proud of for Hollywood and U.S. society,” an editorial in the newspaper said. “No matter how the U.S. society looks at North Korea and Kim Jong-un, Kim…

China's position on this particular incident is just a reflexive defense of the concept of "no interference in other countries' affairs, regardless of how bad they look" something which China strongly advocates for its own reasons, not for the benefit of NK.

China's general attitude over the last decade or two has been a gradually increasing private irritation with NK's behavior and while China still tends to defend NK in public, these defenses seem more and more perfunctory as time goes on. There's a sense that while they value NK as a communist buffer state, the Chinese government has little love for the NK regime in particular, and wishes they'd get their act together.

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#169

Post by lmm »

yourad_io wrote: post #40

Trying to inform oneself about a technical matter through a mainstream news source is an exercise in frustration. Maybe my English needs work. Could someone with superior English skills to mine, please decipher the article and tell me: Is there any actual evidence of an attack? Has traffic spiked through/from NK? Or could this be them "pulling the plug"? Because the first case is: "Someone attacked NK Internet and br…

Post from Dyn Research up now. They make the point that the failure happened gradually, after hours of instability - so it's consistent with a DDOS or a hardware failure in the routers, but not with someone "pulling the plug" or a cable being cut.

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#170

Post by autokad »

patronagezero wrote: post #134
autokad wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he's down voted but not too far off base. The US has already used hacker organizations to inadvertently act in the interests of the US government. Considering that the US almost certainly has moles in Anonymous, it wouldn't be hard to influence them to target Korea

You're over-complicating the issue, I think. Why not just do it themselves, then claim it was 'Anonymous'? No convincing required and no one to argue with. The whole thing smells like just another move to convince the non-believers into thinking NK was responsible for the Sony hack.

i agree, I'm just saying that its possible.
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