By FoxNews.com. North Korea blames the U.S. for the country’s internet shutdown amid allegations of the country hacking Sony Pictures as retaliation for releasing a movie featuring the assassination of the Kim Jong-un.
The country’s National Defense Commission also hurled a racial insult toward President Obama calling him a “monkey inhabiting a tropical forest.”
The regime has vehemently denied any involvement in the cyberattack on Sony, but has expressed its displeasure of the movie.
It is not the first time North Korea has hurled insults toward Washington. Earlier this year, the North called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a wolf with a “hideous” lantern jaw and then called South Korean President Park Guen-hye a prostitute. (Read more about how North Korea blames US HERE)
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FBI’s Claim that North Korea Hacked Sony Faces Criticism
By Judson Berger. It’s been a week since the U.S. government blamed North Korea for the cyber-attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment — and many security experts still aren’t convinced Kim Jong-un is the culprit.
The FBI’s announcement, rather than settling the debate, has only fueled widespread speculation over the source of the attack.
Skeptics claim the evidence the FBI cited is flimsy and inconclusive. They question whether Pyongyang really had the motive, or the ability, to scramble Sony’s systems.
And they’re pushing a range of alternative theories.
Could it have been a disgruntled former Sony employee? Another, more technologically savvy, foreign government? A private band of hackers? (Read more from this story HERE)
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Some Speculate that North Korean Hackers are Behind Fatal Accident at South Korean Nuclear Plant
By John Hayward. South Korea’s government-run hydroelectric and nuclear power company was threatened by an enigmatic group of hackers last week, at the same time the North Korean government was threatening to attack the United States and its allies for daring to suggest that Kim Jong Un’s regime might be behind the attack on Sony Pictures. South Korea puts up with a steady stream of mischief from hackers who profess varying degrees of separation from the North Korean government, but this latest threat was taken very seriously.
The mysterious attackers stole and published blueprints of South Korean nuclear reactors and personal data on plant employees, along with some ominous technical data related to accidental radiation exposure, and suggested something bad would happen if at least three of the country’s 23 reactors were not shut down by Christmas Day. As the UK Independent reported, anti-nuke radicals in Hawaii claimed responsibility for the data leak, but their culpability was not firmly established. Students of the First Cyber War should by now be familiar with the shadow dances of deniability and separation conducted by hostile regimes, and the converse possibility that the work of independent digital vandals could be mistakenly attributed to foreign powers with aligned interests… especially if said foreign powers make a point of applauding when something goes kablooey. Nobody’s wearing a uniform or marching under a flag in this new brand of warfare.
The South Korean government took the threat seriously enough to conduct emergency drills and step up cybersecurity efforts. Emergency teams were put on standby alert through New Year’s Day. . .
Today brings word that a fatal accident has occurred at the site of a nuclear plant under construction in the southeastern city of Ulsan. (Read more from this story HERE)
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The Anti-North Korean film The Interview hit with hundreds of thousands of pirated downloads on Christmas
By Daniel Nussbaum. The Interview is a hit with pirates. The now-infamous Sony Pictures comedy has already been illegally downloaded over 750,000 times in its first 20 hours of release, file-sharing news website TorrentFreak told Breitbart News Thursday morning.
The film began popping up on illegal downloading sites about an hour after its 1 pm Eastern release on YouTube, XBox, Google Play, and other online avenues on Christmas Day. However, only U.S. residents could watch the film through those online outlets, leaving many international users out of luck.
That’s where the pirating comes in. Many commenters on the torrent’s download page indicated that they would have paid to see the film, had they been given the opportunity.
“I want to pay to see it,” wrote one commenter. “But as I’m not in the US, I can’t pay to see it or see it from where I live. It’s not even out in the cinemas where I live and probably will not be. So torrent is the only way I can see it.”
Even the torrent site The Pirate Bay, considered the largest in the world, included a link to the film on the top left corner of its site, despite the site having been down for weeks after a raid by Swedish police crippled its servers. (Read more from this story HERE)
Despite threats from hackers, Sony (SNE) Pictures is making the controversial Seth Rogen comedy available at a limited number of theaters starting on Christmas.
