# Attribution is hard
## Lets blame our perennial adversary!
"""the Sony malware is defo same as used in Jokra attack in South Korea."""
-- Anonymous malware researcher
South Korean banks and business were hacked. The hack was initially attributed
to DPRK because who else would give a shit?
## Education of a hacker
Many blackhat hackers follow a career path that goes like this:
* learn to hack a bit
* hack something local for maximum psychological boost
* ie hack local radio station website, or university, or restaurant chain
* get better at hacking
* get better at English (one of the three main hacking languages, others are Russian and Chinese)
* hack something international
* because better skills, can go after better targets
* because english, can actually figure out what is going on
## Why not DPRK
check out the best external facing propaghanda produced by DPRK as of December 2013.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/miriamberger/the-world-as-viewed-by-north-koreas-propaganda-machine
It is terrible. Stilted, ideological, steeped in the formulaic statements of communist rhetoric. This is old stale crufty stuff. Laughable. Risable.
Look at the media savvy of the current hack. Pastebin. Putting movies on bittorrent. Releasing dumps of embarassing info. emailing journalists (in english!) and feeding them information.
This is a media blitz campaign by a group that is steeped in Internet culture and knows how to play to it. They can manipulate it to maximum effect. This is definitely far more sophisticated than the usual rhetoric from North Korea.
There is no denying that DPRK has CNE capabilities. Historically, nation states have directed those capabilities to advancing the interests of the nation state. This has primarily involved espionage. This Sony hack has no hint of espionage activity at all.
To handle this sophisticated media / Internet campaign so well would require a handler with strong English skills, deep knowledge of the Internet and western culture. This would be someone quite senior and skilled. That is, I can't see DPRK putting this sort of valuable resource onto what is essentially a petty attack against a company that has no strategic value for DPRK.