The group behind the recent hacking scandal at Sony Pictures is now resorting to openly mocking the FBI for their investigation into the matter and the threats that forced the cancellation of The Interview. Guardians of Peace responded to the FBI with a message on Saturday, mocking their investigation and trolling them with a video that essentially called them idiots. From Daily Beast:
“By GOP
The result of investigation by FBI is so excellent that you might have seen what we were doing with your own eyes.
We congratulate you success.
FBI is the BEST in the world.
You will find the gift for FBI at the following address.”
Then, they included a link to [a video] titled “you are an idiot!”—essentially Rickrolling the FBI. The video opens with some words in Japanese, before cutting to a series of gyrating animated bodies shrieking, “You are an idiot!”
You can see the video below and it certainly gets your toe tapping. But in the larger picture, it also raises questions behind the investigation and claims leading us to finger North Korea as the culprit. Not everyone is convinced that the dictatorship is behind the attack, even though the US government has provided evidence to the contrary.
All of the evidence FBI cites would be trivial things to do if a hacker was trying to misdirect attention to DPRK http://t.co/hkZ3D7ZfxK
— Brett Thomas (@the_quark) December 19, 2014
There is a wealth of security experts and former hackers who are throwing question marks at claims that North Korea is behind the attack. Thomas tweet above is one of many that echo the same sentiments: North Korea just doesn’t have the capability for such a tremendous attack.
Former hacker Hector Monsegur spoke with CBS News on the origins of the attack, shining a little light on why people are skeptical of the DPRK theory. From CBS News:
“For something like this to happen, it had to happen over a long period of time. You cannot just exfiltrate one terabyte or 100 terabytes of data in a matter of weeks,” Monsegur said. “It’s not possible. It would have taken months, maybe even years, to exfiltrate something like 100 terabytes of data without anyone noticing.”
Administration officials believe North Korea was behind the hack.
“It could be. In my personal opinion, it’s not,” Monsegur said. “Look at the bandwidth going into North Korea. I mean, the pipelines, the pipes going in, handling data, they only have one major ISP across their entire nation. That kind of information flowing at one time would have shut down North Korean Internet completely.
I can’t blame anyone for being skeptical, especially in this situation. It has been proven before that it is far too easy to jump to a fast conclusion in this day and age, leading to trouble, miscommunication, and sometimes life threatening stakes. We’ve been fed a crock before and will be again, but it comes from all sides and you never know who to believe.
I’m personally not convinced of anything but the facts at this point: someone hacked into Sony Pictures, took an immense amount of data, and eventually forced them to cancel the release of a movie that was highly critical of North Korea. And that’s putting it pretty lightly.
At this point, the only thing folks can do is sit back and watch events unfold. Pointing the finger won’t help until all the details are out.
(Via The Daily Beast / CBS News / Brett Thomas)