Mark Rogers, the director of security operations for DEF CON, the world’s largest hacker conference and the principal security researcher for the world’s leading mobile security company, Cloudflare, has come out and stated that. the FBI’s statement, accusing North Korea of perpetrating the cyber attack on Sony is pure crap, the height of naïveté.
North Korea doesn’t figure in the top 10 national cyber attackers. China is first with 43% and we are second with 10%. Do we really believe that they have the capability to pull this off?
Rogers evidence, based on cyber technology and the availability of cyber information about the various malware and how it is used and abused by all kinds of players shows up the FBI findings as silly and shortsighted. In a Deccember 19th statement the FBI proclaimed that the North Korean government is responsible for the attack on SONY. Rogers says that based on the information they have provided this is ridiculous. I won’t go into all the evidence that Rogers provides that proves the FBI wrong, I will simply refer readers to his Daily Beast article of 12/27/14, which lays out reams of technical data, all of which points to a SONY related rather than a North Korean perpetrator.
What I will do, however, is use Mr. Rogers informative article and his broad background in hacker technology as a basis for some alternative theories of what actually happened and how stupid, incompetent and conniving it makes the FBI, the American media and SONY pictures look in the outcome.
But first a declaimer: Rogers may be wrong, but the odds of that being true are far longer than that the FBI is wrong or covering its ass or that SONY has done the right thing in this whole mess.
Roger’s theory, backed by certain situational circumstances and also put forth by a number of other hacker experts is that the hack was done, not by North Korea but by a disaffected SONY employee. This is based on certain passwords that would have been unknown to other than SONY employees and also to the fact that the IP addresses of the malware on which the FBI based its conclusions were widely available to almost anyone with basic hacker knowledge.
So, what’s the story? The story is, that the hack was done by an insider. SONY is currently involved in laying off a significant number of employees. Maybe one of them decided to get even, a full time occupation in Hollywood, or maybe it was just some insider who has a grudge against the company. This is also a full time enterprise in La La Land. So let’s go ahead on that theory. The company get’s hacked. Now a lot of companies have been hacked lately. Some by foreign powers some by angry hackers, some to gather information and some to just do damage to product or production. Whatever the reason, SONY gets hacked. And because it’s a movie company, the media picks up on it big time. Very few of the other industrial or corporate hacks are even mentioned in the media but because it’s SONY it’s big news.
And like all big news, real or media generated, it is accompanied by massive speculation. That speculation, because SONY is coming out with a movie that has already been condemned in North Korea, leads to the conclusion that the source of the hack, must be North Korea. After all, they already have an ax to grind, don’t they? It is only after this conclusion had appeared in the media that the hackers return with the demands that “The Interview,” be pulled from release. Convenient, huh?
Why convenient? Well, I’ve seen “The Interview,” and consider it one of the worst pieces of filmmaking in the history of Hollywood. The script stinks, some of the acting is horrible, the rest mundane, the satire isn’t, and it’s just a mess. As my wife said when we finished watching it, “You’ve just wasted two hours of my life, you owe me big time.”
One must assume that someone at SONY had watched this film before the events involving it transpired. Unless they were brain dead or completely lacking in any artistic sensibilities they must have known they had a disaster on their hands. They also knew that the movie, considering its elements, would open to at least a respectable audience. The problem would become word of mouth, which would kill it on day two. So, in order to see any profit they would have to get a hell of a lot more than a respectable opening day audience. What to do? Create an international incident around it that would make it must see by that huge audience segment that needs to see everything first. These are the people who line up outside toy stores for the new video game or around the block from Apple for the new iPhone.
So some clever conniver at SONY, either in marketing or at the top, decides that since North Korea has banned this movie from ever being shown there and they have already been hackled, there is a scenario by which the studio can have a shot at making back its investment in this stinker. SONY announces that they are pulling it to protect the American public from exploding movie houses. They already know, because anyone would know, that the reaction from many in the American public who are not infected with the cowardice gene, will be to stand up on their hind legs and scream about not letting any nasty little Asian country tell us what we can or can’t do and to come out fighting over censorship.
Luckily the President goes on TV, berates SONY for being a bunch of wusses and tells them that no one should be able to censor anything that we do in America. This makes it unnecessary for SONY to back off their pulling the film; it’s now a matter of national pride that they show it. So despite their earlier stand that no distributor would distribute it, nor any theatre show it, SONY miraculously finds a way to get the job done and goes diligently to work arranging an ad lib distribution policy that will open the film in a few independent theatres but also on line through a number of platforms all on the same day. Get the picture? It’s now all or nothing, a desperate shot at getting enough viewers on board before word of mouth kills it, to at least recoup some of the already spent production and advertising budget. Did it work? I guess we’ll just have to wait for the numbers, but regardless, there’s damned little chance that the North Koreans had anything to do with it.
In the middle of all this, George Clooney, not getting what was actually going on but having all the right instincts about being a human being and an American calls on the Hollywood elite to back SONY with a vote of confidence and a petition demanding that the movie not be censored by anyone, but be shown. Not surprising to anyone but George, he gets not one signature on his proclamation, proving once again the greed and cowardice of those who supply our entertainment.
Like any attempt to censor in the past, most of which had to do with sex and nudity, this one was destined to backfire. When the Legion of Decency banned films they exploded at the box office. The same is true now. I had no desire to see this picture, but now I couldn’t miss it and I suspect that there are millions of other Americans who feel the same way I do. This gave SONY a real shot at distribution success if only they could get enough people to see it the first day, before word of mouth killed it.
It might have worked, it still might depending on the first night returns but despite coming up with a good if sneaky plan, SONT couldn’t have the patience to let the furor build to a point where “The Interview” was a must see for almost everyone in the country. They moved, many think, too fast. Another week would have helped their box office chances. But, we’ll see.
Meanwhile, just in case they were right, the FBI’s calculations seem to have led to a mysterious scuttling of North Korea’s military computer functions. Our government claims to know nothing about it. China says the same. Must be one of those bug in the system things. What do you think?