could have been an inside job, disgruntled employee or a silly movie publicity stunt that stupidly used the naughty few'"terror!!! words" that catches NSA attention.

It does sound technically impossible to come from the outside, based on the massive amount of data taken.

When the data theft occurred, the only demand being made was for money. The whole "Interview" connection was created out of whole cloth by the Sony marketing department. The corporate/state media plays this angle down, of course, since it relies so much on Sony for its income through advertising. I'm sure there were plenty of high-fives around the Sony offices when they managed to even get Obama on the bandwagon.

They are quoting Kurt Stammberger, a senior vice president with Norse Security.

"Sony was not just hacked, this is a company that was essentially nuked from the inside," said Stammberger. "We are very confident that this was not an attack master-minded by North Korea and that insiders were key to the implementation of one of the most devastating attacks in history."

He says Norse data is pointing towards a woman who calls herself "Lena" and claims to be connected with the so-called "Guardians of Peace" hacking group. Norse believes it's identified this woman as someone who worked at Sony in Los Angeles for ten years until leaving the company this past May. "This woman was in precisely the right position and had the deep technical background she would need to locate the specific servers that were compromised," Stammberger told me.

Other experts in cybersecurity and private intelligence are also questioning the FBI's claim that North Korea is solely to blame for the Sony hack.

"There are certainly North Korean fingerprints on this but when we run all those leads to ground they turn out to be decoys or red herrings," said Stammberger.

<snip>

<snip>

For one, skeptics note that the few malware samples they have studied indicate the hackers routed their attack through computers all over the world. One of those computers, in Bolivia, had been used by the same group to hack targets in South Korea. But that computer, as well as others in Poland, Italy, Thailand, Singapore, Cyprus and the United States, were all freely available to anyone to use, which opens the list of suspects to anyone with an Internet connection and basic hacking skills.

For another, Sony’s attackers constructed their malware on computers configured with Korean language settings, but skeptics note that those settings could have been reset to deflect blame. They also note the attackers used commercial software wiping tools that could have been purchased by anyone.

They also point out that whoever attacked Sony had a keen understanding of its computer systems — the names of company servers and passwords were all hard-coded into the malware — suggesting the hackers were inside Sony before they launched their attack. Or it could even have been an inside job.

And then there’s the motive. Government officials claim the Sony attacks were retaliation for “The Interview,” a feature film about two bumbling journalists hired by the C.I.A. to assassinate North Korea’s leader. In a letter last June, North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations called the film “an act of war.” But naysayers point out that, as far as they can tell, Sony’s attackers did not mention the film as motivation until that theory percolated in the media.

The simpler explanation is that it was an angry “insider,” Mr. Rogers wrote. “Combine that with the details of several layoffs that Sony was planning, and you don’t have to stretch the imagination too far to consider that a disgruntled Sony employee might be at the heart of it all.”

On Wednesday, one alternate theory emerged. Computational linguists at Taia Global, a cybersecurity consultancy, performed a linguistic analysis of the hackers’ online messages — which were all written in imperfect English — and concluded that based on translation errors and phrasing, the attackers are more likely to be Russian speakers than Korean speakers.

<snip>

The quantum is just a shout away. That which is possible will happen.

There are so many enlightening answers to this mystery that time is needed to answer them all. Keep the faith, keep it real and the inevitable will occur. Brothers and sisters in arms until the truth prevails.

“The FBI also observed significant overlap between the infrastructure used in this attack and other malicious cyber activity the U.S. government has previously linked directly to North Korea. For example, the FBI discovered that several Internet protocol (IP) addresses associated with known North Korean infrastructure communicated with IP addresses that were hardcoded into the data deletion malware used in this attack.”

What they are saying is that the Internet addresses found after the Sony Picture attack are “known” addresses that had previously been used by North Korea in other cyberattacks.

To cyber security experts, the naivety of this statement beggars belief. Note to the FBI: Just because a system with a particular IP address was used for cybercrime doesn’t mean that from now on every time you see that IP address you can link it to cybercrime. Plus, while sometimes IPs can be “permanent”, at other times IPs last just a few seconds.

It isn’t the IP address that the FBI should be paying attention to. Rather it’s the server or service that’s behind it.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/24/no-north-korea-didn-t-hack-sony.html?source=TDB&via=FB_Page

common sense becomes a conspiracy theory.

Obama was allowed one and a bit terms without all the neocon BS, now they've opened the floodgates again.