Yeah.
I haven’t bought that since J. Edgar Hoover bought his first slip:
The director of the FBI has defended his bureau’s claim that the hacking attack against Sony Pictures was the work of the North Korean government – saying skeptics “don’t have the facts that I have.”
Speaking at a cybersecurity conference at Fordham University in New York City on Wednesday, FBI boss James Comey said he has “very high confidence” that Pyongyang was responsible for the comprehensive ransacking of the movie studio’s servers.
When asked why security experts favor a different explanation – that the attack was probably the work of disgruntled insiders or former employees – Comey said, “They don’t have the facts that I have, don’t see what I see.”
That’s true, because the FBI has remained tight-lipped as to the exact evidence that it believes links the Sony incident to North Korea. But on Wednesday, Comey offered the most detailed explanation yet of the government’s reasoning.
When the group calling itself Guardians of Peace sent threatening emails and made other online statements, Comey said, it mostly used proxy servers to disguise the messages’ origins. “But several times, they got sloppy,” he claimed.
On those occasions, he said, the group sent messages from servers with IP addresses “that were exclusively used by the North Koreans,” giving law enforcement a “very clear indication of who was doing this.”
This makes no sense at all.
It’s a pain in the ass to set up this kind of stuff, but once you do, you would have to actively decide to screw this up.
As the article notes:
Public IP network addresses, by themselves, are a poor indicator of the true origin of internet attacks, due to the ease with which traffic can be spoofed or routed through multiple networks. For this reason, infosec professionals remain skeptical the Kim government is responsible for the Sony Pictures hack.
How much do you want to guess that the hackers “got sloppy” only after the DPRK got fingered?
I ain’t buying it.
Given the history of stove-piping by the US state security apparatus, I need something beyond, “If you knew what I do.”