These attacks went way beyond celebrities. Sony employees and their families medical records have been leaked. This was targeted intimidation by N Korea and the American public doesn’t seem to give a crap. If they can hack Sony what other companies are vulnerable? What other information have they already stolen that’s not even known? It’s not just businesses that can be hacked. Public Utilities, dams, power plants, gov. agencies are all potentially vulnerable. Cyber War will be a critical component if there’s ever another world war. It won’t just be fought on a physical battlefield. China, Russia, N Korea all have spent many years developing sophisticated cyber warfare units. Many viruses and trojans have been linked back to these countries.
The press could have voluntarily agreed not to publish the private information. Report the incident, but don’t reward the criminals by giving them what they want. But that is too much to expect from the modern press. There s no code or professionalism in journalism anymore. They get excited reporting about an private email snub against Angelina Jolie. Or that some Sony executive made a racial crack about Obama. Yeah, that draws them some clicks on their news pages. :rolleyes:
I’m hoping that maybe the N. Koreans exposed some of their methods and capabilities. That our intelligence service can better understand what danger they pose to our National Security. There could be a positive outcome from this. I don’t know.
Why isn’t the American Public concerned or even outraged by this?
Sony bears a lot of responsibility for their carelessness. According to CNN their lax security is appalling. But, first their network had to be breached before any of these documents could be accessed. I’m not sure, but Sony should have had a secure Intranet behind their firewall. Intranet of course is a private network not accessible from the outside. It’s one of the first lines of defense.
First off, there’s no evidence North Korea had anything to do with it. There are plenty of parties out there with a grudge against Japan, Sony, and Hollywood. Second, you’re right that it’s a terrible thing to do and few Americans will say differently. It’s kind of like when Anonymous hacks the Klan: In principle, I think it’s wrong, but other issues outrage me more.
“Some speculate”? That’s quality journalism right there.
It IS a big deal. It makes it clear that nothing put in the internet is private. The only safety you have from invasion of privacy is being uninteresting enough.
Its not a panic because the vast majority of these “hacks” are social engineering. The weak link in almost any network is not the machine, its the operators. No system can be made immune to careless or under informed employees.
North Korea works tens of thousands of people to death in modern day slavery, is run by a despotic and tyrannical dictator, and denies to millions the freedom and prosperity we take for granted each and every day. This scandal is chump change compared to all the other terrible stuff they do.
Americans aren’t getting worked up about it because Fox News is flogging it as another “scandal” for liberals. After Ebola. Benghazi, etc. Americans are starting to ignore any “scandal” that starts on Fox News and talk radio. They’ve cried wolf too many times.
It would be more of a story if it was just reported straightly.
A lot of that hacked private personal information that’s been mentioned is like – WTF is Sony doing with all that information about each employee anyway? Like I’ve seen some mentions of employees’ medical histories being leaked? (ETA: As mentioned by OP and in the article he linked.) I can see why a medical insurance carrier would have records like that, but why is the employer collecting that much detailed stuff about all the employees?
Based on the juvenile, internet slang laced statements coming from the hackers responsible, I very highly doubt that North Korea is directly responsible for the hack. There’s a slight possibility that the NK government might have hired an underground hacker group to do whatever they wanted but even that possibility is remote. A hack by any kind of organised group is far more likely to negotiate conditions behind the scenes rather than just indiscriminately fling documents into the world.
Most likely, it’s a bunch of self styled amateur hacktivists doing it for the lolz.
I think Americans are generally not sympathetic to the plight of large corporations, even though its made up of many regular people. They see it as a monolithic entity so they are able to reduce sympathy for that than when confronted with the harm to an individual. We’re also acutely aware of too many large corporations who have screwed us in one way or another, so we tend to think its karmic retribution if something bad happens to it
Personally, I have issues with Sony, the movie studios, and the whole entertainment industry’s unfairness towards artists and consumers. I cannot give a damn about Sony’s movies being leaked if I’m still going to watch some, if they are still going to make millions, and if they are still trying to sue teenagers for downloading some music. As the leaks have shown, stopping that is still a high priority for them, so fuck them
I feel bad about the employees caught up in the fight, but I console myself by saying that there is almost an astronomically small percentage that among the tens of thousands of private information leaked, that somebody will be actually hurt by it. So somebody’s embarrassing sick days are tracked, so what? What are the chances that it’ll come back to bite them later on? It could happen, but the chances are small.
Lastly, I don’t like how some things are industry secrets and everyone’s so obsessed with money. If Sony loses some money because they have to negotiate to pay women more, or give actors a higher cut, or let smaller TV markets know how much others are paying for syndications of popular shows, then good, they shouldn’t be making that much anyway, or should be more willing to share the costs. One incredulous article I read concerned “ultimates”, referring to how much money a movie ultimately made taking into account everything it cost to produce it. I couldn’t believe this was an industry secret. Fans like me enjoy discussing and knowing about how much movies make and how much actors get paid. For the movie industry to keep that a secret makes me resentful of how they are running things just like how Nielsen doesn’t really publish their ratings. Or they may do so now, but at one time I looked on their website and they said something to the effect of “Nielsen doesn’t publish ratings because it may influence how people watch”. To me, its more important that I know how much my favorite shows are doing. And if the ratings influence me to check out a highly-rated show? So what? Nielsen’s not doing this for charity, they make money, so don’t BS me using some altruistic non-interference lie.
I think there is some amount of “breach fatigue” among the American public. The Sony breach is catastrophic, but for lots of Americans it probably goes on the list of “Yet Another Damn Breach That Didn’t Affect Me Personally.”
It’s not at all clear that NK is behind the attack. And, if they are, I agree with The Joker and the Thief that this is pretty low level evil compared to the crap NK does on a daily basis.
Although it has not been conclusively established, it is likely that the US and Israel were behind the Stuxnet malware that infected Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility in 2009 and impeded its enrichment program. Stuxnet was designed to subtly compromise the enrichment process so that it could not produce satisfactory results. It could, however, have caused physical destruction by misconfiguring the centrifuges. Anyway, the point is that the US is also a user of these kinds of attacks, so we might want to hang on to the stones for now.
Information security people have long been warning of computer attacks against critical infrastructure like power plants and dams. I would expect that kind of attack to become a routine part of warfare in the near future.
The problem is, as I see it, there’s nothing we can really do about it.
Blowing stuff up won’t help. North Korea is already embargoed up to here. We’re already aware that computer security is important and there’s no “tech surge” that will make a difference. Companies like Sony are not exactly defenseless targets, and so I don’t feel the need to champion the rights of down-trodden multi-national corporations.
So in the end, I feel like the powers-that-be will muddle through this one and try to resolve it as best they can.
It’s another of the evils of the 24 hour news cycle combined with the Internet. Now it’s every internet, television, radio and print news source competing with each other for advertising $$ spent on news. When you have more people beating the bushes than ever before, and all of them trying to make themselves stand out, it’s not surprising that any concept of fair play or integrity would go straight out the window.
Beyond that, I think people have the feeling that Sony half deserves what they get for being SO incompetent at network security.
For the most part, the hacking hasn’t done much harm beyond a little embarassment. The celebs that got trashed in the emails will get over it.
Actually, I’m wondering if this might in fact be a ploy by Sony itself to work up interest in what otherwise looks to be a pretty stupid & forgettable movie.
