NEW YORK: The US National Security Agency (NSA) had penetrated North Korea’s computer sys­tems first although the US government recently took the rare step of directly blaming North Korea for the crippling hack of Sony in retaliation for its satire film “The interview”, the New York Times said in an exclusive report on Monday.

The Times reported that the penetration occurred before the hack of Sony, but US intelligence officials would not discuss the report or confirm its details.

The Times report says the evidence gleaned from the US penetration of North Korean government hackers’ activities persuaded Obama and other top officials that North Korea was behind the attack.

In another related report the NBC news claimed it has been told that the US intelligence agencies did not have any warning of the Sony hacking through its monitoring of North Korean computers, and that the first the government learned of the Sony attack was on Nov 24, when the company alerted the FBI’s cyber unit.

The NSA used South Korea’s established inroads to install malware on North Korean networks, which was able to provide enough evidence to pinpoint the nation as the source of the Sony hack, according to anonymous government officials. This leads to the question, if the NSA had enough intel, why wasn’t it able to advise Sony of the attack ahead of time?

Administration officials said that the “spear-phishing” attacks — which entice e-mail users to download infected files — didn’t look out of the ordinary or raise any alarms. But those attacks allowed the hackers to steal a key system admin’s credentials, which they used to carefully infiltrate the system, search out key files and eventually destroy or leak them.

Though the NSA’s backdoor ‘beacons’ in N. Korea’s systems didn’t help it see the hack coming, they were instrumental in building a case against the nation afterwards. The evidence convinced President Obama to quickly accuse Kim Jong-Un’s of orchestrating the hack — the first time the US has made such a charge, according to the New York Times.

Published in Dawn January 20th , 2015

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