There is no way North Korea had the sophistication to hack SONY. Hacking requires knowledge of the latest security vulnerabilities. It's impossible to develop good hackers on such a censored network.
> Hacking requires knowledge of the latest security vulnerabilities.
Again, no.
> It's impossible to develop good hackers on such a censored network.
Also no. I can imagine being on a heavily censored network being a prime breeding ground for great hackers. Either way, if I were a nation state sponsoring a hack I would presumably give uncensored access to my hack team.
Totally. Indeed the times i have been more driven and successfull at hacking something, has been on the most restricted environments looking for freedom. bypassing the proxy for example trough icmp tunnels... when you already have the freedom there is less passion to hack something
If you try to break rules in NK, you're dead. Hacking culture and exploration doesn't fit in under a communist regime. No place to practice = no way to become a pro.
It may have been outsourced. However, they didn't contract a very talented team since they didn't hop any boxes to hide their identity better. More likely, someone unrelated to NK hacked a box inside NK and started an attack from there.
You are making the fatal assumption that those hacker teams are actually within North Korea. The U.S. military doesn't train for jungle warfare in the United States, they often used Panama, among other places. You'd be surprised how the NKs operate. Many of their operators are based in Japan, for instance, to say nothing of training conducted in China.
NK has nuclear weapons. It sends elites to western universities. Their intranet is heavily censored, but that doesn't mean that there are no elites who have access to the wider Internet.
