Doesn't even rise to circumstantial.

Unless there are men named Amy and Maria, that, on first glance, anyway, looks odd. And given their track record it's not at all outside the realm of possibility. I am starting to think SONY doesn't just have a "hacking" problem, they have a "woman" problem:

Sony execs accused of racism, sexual harassment by black female worker in hacked email: report
Another email hacked from Sony Pictures details the alleged harassment of a black female employee fired from the company in 2011, it was reported Friday. The accuser says she was passed over for promotions, called misogynistic names, and subjected to an atmosphere of bullying and unwelcome advances.
BY GINGER ADAMS OTIS

...but if the referenced cuts hit women even harder than they often do, the attempt to connect the hacking to particular women of interest still looks tenuous as hell. There's almost no there there, so far.

overrepresented on those lay-off lists.

CBS coverage here:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/did-the-fbi-get-it-wrong-on-north-korea/

That's still irrelevant to the attempt to connect the hacking to particular people. Still extremely tenuous.

likely/possible as the next, absent any definitive expressions/evidence from the FBI.

I guess I can't agree with the word "tenuous." I'd say one explanation is as plausible as the next--or maybe it was a smorgasbord approach; a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Apparently the security firm who did the analysis has connected the hacking to at least one specific person, a woman named Lena (Lena2) who supposedly worked with LULZSEC on the hack and has posted complaints about gender bias at SONY on social media.

I just don't see that it's been made yet.

Any investigation should of course include everyone known to have had access.

what she says in her emails now.

And, Bains.. what a rat's nest.. sure they laid off a lot of females but on the plus side they have binders.. full of them!

Have fun

And the ones they kept, they paid less than their male counterparts...

Maybe there's something to this assertion...

They were always oh-so-careful to produce documentation to prove they weren't laying off just the more senior, i. e. higher paid people. I believe there are some class-action suits already pending.

just to be all nit-picky and stuff.

will he be obligated to apologize to that fat little jerk?

Boy what a propaganda coup that would be for North Korea.

And whoever was responsible for Obama making that mistake could be in big trouble.

doesn't mean that insider didn't have help from other sources.

This is still an evolving story--but I thought this take was interesting (if not The Last Word on the subject).

to apologize. Not to the ghosts of 2-3 million southeast Asians, not to the ghosts of 1 million Iraqis, not to the ghosts of countless South and Central Americans. WE. NEVER. APOLOGIZE.

Rhetoric is just what it is. The rest of world don't listen what comes out as plans, policy or stated tact of the US Establishment but more overly they watch is done under the name of it.

An attack on Obama's low level staffers is an attack on Obama himself (to so some people here). You may end up getting flooded by people accusing you of being an anti-obama troll for such a comment.

The Sony hack seemed like such a great opportunity to get all military intervention and preemptive up against North Korea. What a darn shame for the MIC.


(sarcasm)

If that was the plan, they need to do way, WAY better!

And force compliance with its dictates through cyber-sabotage.

Of course, we would have to respond in a manner which would, "Teach them a lesson."

Their "network" being along the lines of a series of high school computer labs scattered hither and yon, it would seem.

They could have done this the easy way, not with any great hacking skills, but with a briefcase of cash. Get a spy to Hollywood, to find someone disgruntled at SONY, where the "offending" picture was being made, co-opt him or her, have them download the material onto thumb drives, and hand it off to the spy.

How to get the spy to Hollywood? Run 'em through Mexico. Pay a mule well and they're off to the races. Or maybe slip 'em off a freighter ... http://www.nknews.org/2014/08/north-korean-ship-near-mexico-impounded-without-proper-insurance/

The FBI still thinks NK is in the mix, and as some reports have suggested, they may have information that has not been made public. It could actually be a simple yet perfect storm of geopolitics, art (such as it is), culture, and internal business operations that created this imbroglio.

Time should, as it often does, reveal all...

apparently Sony has released the movie online and made 14 Million as of yesterday. Bloomberg Business was reporting that it was a "test" to see if Sony could release movies online doing deals with Amazon & Netflix. They way they were talking it seems Sony benefits. One did ask a question about why they didn't just take the insurance money which would be 80 mil...instead of releasing online where they wouldn't make as much. The answer from another one of the Wall Streeters was that if they could make this much in a few days maybe it would work out.

Rather odd all of that. If they'd get the insurance money because NoKorea hacked them why not take it and run since the movie wasn't supposted to be that great in the first place. Unless they really couldn't prove that the hack was real or were worried that insurance company would investigate further and Sony didn't want to take a chance that it wasn't NoKorea.

Anyway...Bloomberg Media analysts thought it was a good test for Sony to get around doing contracts with the major theater companies and just go online with some of their productions.

It's always interesting to watch "The Business" angle of things these days. Since Wall Street MIC/Media Complex rules.

Thanks for all these links, MADem. Saved for later reading, but verrryyy interesting.

They're still insisting that NK had a hand in.

It could be that a disgruntled employee found herself in the company of an Asian gentleman of uncertain ethnicity who offered to help her take them down a peg. Maybe he paid her. Or maybe she did it for the "Get back at you for firing ME" thing. So many possibilities!

for giving misleading information might be their reason for insistence. They won't look good if they jumped the gun causing our President to come out and defend Sony and imply that we were going to act on whatNoKorea did in some fashion at some time in retaliation.

Thanks for the updates on this.

I wonder if the U.S. was responsible for taking down the N. Korean internet and cell phones? At least now he can stop promoting an awful movie.

“When the FBI made the announcement so soon after the initial hack was unveiled, everyone in the [cyber] intelligence community kind of raised their eyebrows at it, because it’s really hard to pin this on anyone within days of the attack,” Kurt Stammberger said in an interview as his company briefed FBI investigators Monday afternoon.

Who knows?, Corps or Countries could pay some country like NK for 'hacked information' in return for any type of import products.

stage; perhaps not with cooperation, but who knows?

gold miners all 'disappeared' years ago

and maybe the computers in NK are essentially "slave" machines that are used to reroute Internet traffic and creating cover for actual hacker locations. You're right, there are so many possibilities. And the "official line" has eroding credibility these days.

that's not been made public.

One item doesn't obviate the other, in any event. Both circumstances could be true.

Where people are falling down is that they're all assuming this was a "hack"--because that's what everybody does, they "hack." They go in and out through the net.

What may have happened here is the intervention of some HUMINT--someone, perhaps a disgruntled employee, downloaded information onto a thumb drive, say, and handed that thumb drive off to a PERSON who hand delivered it elsewhere for dissemination. Very old school, but it leaves far less of a footprint, doesn't it?

I think at this point, it is more than one POV, as most in the security business don't think NK were responsible. I'm sure that when it is figured out, and if NK wasn't responsible, Obama will offer a sincere apology.

FBI's position is that there's information that the security investigators don't have.

I'm speculating, as I said elsewhere in the thread, but if there was a NK HUMINT asset in the mix, the security investigators would not "see" that and thus they wouldn't pick up on that end of things.

Note back in 2008, when we were blaming North korea for the "super dollar" counterfeits that lead to us changing our currency substantially to avoid such counterfeits. McClatchey then reported then that it was more likely that the CIA was producing such counterfeits to help fund their operations without scrutiny. If this newer hack story is also found to be true, then perhaps this and the older operation should have newer investigations to see whether there is a clandestine "blame korea" infrastructure for things that are being "kept quiet" that our government and other linked PTB entities may be engaged in.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2762230

I doubt they want the real story to come out. No, I don't know who and I don't have a real theory who it was or the motivation.

This man would never allow the American people to be misled:

That's why I find it so funny to hear immediate accusations of "See? Those dumb, ignorant businessmen don't know what the hell to do about security!"

There is no fool-proof security on the Internet. There never will be.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

Egg on the face of the FBI, no doubt the POTUS will take the blame but really it is the FBI that should be apologizing if this turns out to be true NOT the POTUS.

I guess hacked by NK sounds much better than hacked by women laid off unfairly by Sony (thanks to Mittens and his binders and binders full of women employees). One is a PR win the other a PR nightmare imo.

a conspiracy theory.
Which it is.
This is different.

As I wrote in the other thread -

It's a good thing Obama maintained "plausible deniability" on his "proportional response".

The manipulation of the American people - especially of the older generation who still maintained Cold War 'tudes and who didn't understand that the traditional national "boxes" are the least of our worries when it comes to cyber warfare - really annoyed the heck out of me.

In this article here: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30632711

But they may be saying that for fame of to troll/throw noise.