N.S.A. Breached North Korean Networks Before Sony Attack, Officials Say

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/world/asia/nsa-tapped-into-north-korean-networks-before-sony-attack-officials-say.html

By DAVID E. SANGER and MARTIN FACKLER
The New York Times
JAN. 18, 2015

WASHINGTON — The trail that led American officials to blame North Korea 
for the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November 
winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agency scrambled to break 
into the computer systems of a country considered one of the most 
impenetrable targets on earth.

Spurred by growing concern about North Korea’s maturing capabilities, the 
American spy agency drilled into the Chinese networks that connect North 
Korea to the outside world, picked through connections in Malaysia favored 
by North Korean hackers and penetrated directly into the North with the 
help of South Korea and other American allies, according to former United 
States and foreign officials, computer experts later briefed on the 
operations and a newly disclosed N.S.A. document.

A classified security agency program expanded into an ambitious effort, 
officials said, to place malware that could track the internal workings of 
many of the computers and networks used by the North’s hackers, a force 
that South Korea’s military recently said numbers roughly 6,000 people. 
Most are commanded by the country’s main intelligence service, called the 
Reconnaissance General Bureau, and Bureau 121, its secretive hacking unit, 
with a large outpost in China.

The evidence gathered by the “early warning radar” of software 
painstakingly hidden to monitor North Korea’s activities proved critical 
in persuading President Obama to accuse the government of Kim Jong-un of 
ordering the Sony attack, according to the officials and experts, who 
spoke on the condition of anonymity about the classified N.S.A. operation.

[...]

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