STE WILLIAMS

Sysadmin Blog Researchers think they have figured out how Sony was hacked. Long story short: the hackers knew what they were doing and covered their tracks with some clever, but really basic, tricks. I’m not particularly surprised by this, but I am surprised that others are surprised by it.

The Register commenter Yet Another Anonymous Coward had a topical comment titled “Let me get this straight”, saying that “The world’s most backward country executed the world’s most advanced cyber attack and chose as its target the American subsidiary of a Japanese entertainment company?”

“Or, perhaps it has secretly infiltrated every other military and government computer system in the west and are actually running everything?”

Neither possibility should be particularly surprising.

Hacking isn’t hard

First off, let’s start with the statement that I don’t have any idea if North Korea did, in fact, hack Sony. It may have. It may not have. You can’t trust anything North Korea has to say on the matter. Sadly, we also can’t trust anything any of our governments say.

That all said, I absolutely believe North Korea has the capability to do this. Yes, North Korea is backwards. It doesn’t have enough bombs and missiles and guns to really make anyone except South Korea really sit up and take notice.

Even South Korea isn’t really all that worried, because if you tried to get those bombs and missiles and guns from A to B then everyone on earth would see it happening and a cloud of cruise missiles would rain down on the North Korean military movement, making for a short but exciting news cycle.

North Korea’s leadership know this. So what’s a megalomaniacal false demigod of a leader to do in order to strike at the hearts of his perceived enemies? Develop “cyber” capabilities. Being a good hacker doesn’t take some mystical skill. It doesn’t take a super computer and it doesn’t take a country full of cloud providers.

A half decent hacker can penetrate almost any system with nothing more than a netbook and good operational security. You can use any operating system or device if you know your tools well enough, or you write good enough tools. For the difficult hacks you’re realistically going to have to do both.

Hacking isn’t about technology. It’s about process. It’s about procedure. It’s about discipline, knowledge, study and caution.

We portray hackers as people who have a stroke of genius and then mash the keyboard really hard and poof! They’ve reversed the polarity on the tachyon inverter and suddenly used the thermostat to overwrite the hidden sectors on the tablet that controls the nuclear reactor. Oh noes!

State-level hacking

Anyone who has the resources to hire a full-time research team and a pair of decent developers can build credible offensive hacking capabilities. This means that most 50-individual companies on the planet theoretically have the resources to build both malware and network-based deployment capabilities.

Not only does this make every government on earth a threat, but by dint of the low cost of developing this capability, industrial espionage hacking teams are guaranteed to be practically everywhere. Organised crime will, without question, have extensive capabilities as well.

The idea of “state-level” capabilities moves the needle a bit, but in all honesty not by much. The primary advantage that state sponsorship brings to a hacking team is not additional nerds or computer infrastructure. It is spies and saboteurs.

Governments have people around the world, or they can hire mercenaries and consultants to get the job done. People cost money and this means that only a handful of organisations can manage the global reach of even a small government.

Any large enterprise has the financial resources to develop this capability. The large organised religious groups would as well. The larger organised crime groups have global reach, but many are loose collections of small families or clans and may not have the cohesion for unified long-term investments on this level.

Network activist and hacktivist body Anonymous and other loose – but large – populist collectives or organisations could theoretically bring state-level resources to bear. In the case of Anonymous it would be easier to herd cats than to develop any true state-level offensive capabilities, but there are plenty of non-commercial, non-governmental, non-religious organisations with global presences to be considered, and state-level hacking capabilities are more about the ability to physically access networks, people and research resources than the software cooked up by the nerds.

I don’t doubt that North Korea could have cut through Sony’s defences like they weren’t even there. Every state-level actor out there could probably go through most corporate or personal networks with similar ease. This doesn’t, however, mean that these state-level actors could get into an actively well defended network.

Beyond state-level

Defending a network properly costs a lot of money. If you want to do it, you cannot simply rely on off-the-shelf software and tools. You need to hire hackers to defend against hackers. People who are trained in operational security and who look as much for what isn’t there as what is.

Shelfware isn’t going to catch gaps in logs or other fairly simple tricks to cover one’s tracks. Someone who has actually spent time penetrating other systems and had to think about these things just might. These people are not cheap, and there aren’t many of them.

Those networks which are defended by teams of the best will not fall to your average state-level, organised crime or industrial espionage hacking crew. They will understand, amongst other things, that eggshell security doesn’t cut it. That breaches will occur will have been foreseen, and they will have built traps, isolation procedures and much, much more to counter attacks.

To get into these networks you need more than a state-level hacking apparatus. You need a hacking industry. You need to have billions of dollars being spent every year to identify new zero-day exploits, employ professional spies to gather data and be able to perform physical attacks against networks (such as compromising data centres or backhaul data links).

No one nation – not even the US – can pull this off. Developing this level of capability takes international cooperation. It takes the cooperation of nations with private industry. It requires tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of people working together to industrialise network compromise.

It really could have been North Korea

So, yes, Sony’s breach absolutely could have been the work of the North Koreans. It is even a logical target if their goal is to train their hacking team against a live target. North Korea has no love for Japan or the US, so taking on what was once an iconic corporation in those countries might have some symbolism.

More to the point, Sony was soft. It wasn’t expecting an attack, it wasn’t particularly well defended, and it didn’t have the resources (that larger, more profitable corporations have or are developing) to react in real time.

I don’t buy the proposed political motivations of North Korea hacking Sony one bit. Sony is a stupid target if you want to make an actual statement. But it is exactly the right target to train against.

We are all viable targets. Even if we are not a tempting target because what we have squirreled away on our networks, we might just be useful to train against. It could be that the only purpose the compromise of our network serves is target practice for someone going after meatier game.

Given the above, it’s time for us to stop thinking that quality attackers are few and far between, or that our networks will only be attacked for good reason. It’s time to make network security something we constantly evolve and refine and hire full-time professionals to oversee. ®

Read PART 1 here.

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Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/24/north_korea_could_have_pwned_sony/