The FBI formally accused North Korea as the culprit behind last month's Sony Pictures computer hacking, but experts have begun to question the FBI's assessment of the communist country's involvement.
Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader of North Korea (File photo: AP)
Marc Rogers, a principal security researcher at CloudFare, Inc. in San Francisco, and Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard University national security law professor, among others, have raised concerns over the FBI's decision to pin the blame on North Korea.
There are several more reasons than those listed here. However, below are the three most convincing and substantive reasons why the FBI might have gotten this one wrong.
1. The code used to hack into Sony's system was written on a PC with Korean locale and language. However, traditional Korean isn't spoken in North Korea. North Korea has its own dialect and the communist country forbids people there from speaking traditional Korean.
In this Sunday, April 15, 2012 file photo, a North Korean vehicle carrying a missile passes by during a mass military parade in Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung Square to celebrate the centenary of the birth of late North Korean founder Kim Il Sung. (Credit: AP)
2. The hacker or hackers, whomever they are, wanted revenge – not money. They had the information they needed to access all of Sony's accounts, including its financial accounts. They could have easily cashed out. The information in the business documents to which they also had access suggests it wasn't the work of a competitor.
Any of these things the hackers could have done but, for reasons unclear, chose not to do. Instead, they essentially erased the data, leaving experts to question why any suspected nation state that might have carried out the attack would willingly dump so much information it could use against the U.S. and Hollywood.
The entrance of Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California is seen December 16, 2014. "Guardians of Peace" hackers invoked the 9/11 attacks in their most chilling threat yet against Sony Pictures, warning the Hollywood studio not to release a film which has angered North Korea. (Photo credit: AFP/Getty Images)
3. The FBI noted that the evidence showed this attack had characteristics of prior attacks which had been attributed to North Korea, but the federal agency said nothing about those previous attacks.
It's also possible another nation pretended to be North Korea. If the United States knows which characteristics signal an attack by North Korea, other countries could use those characteristics to in order to frame North Korea and divert attention from the real hacker.
The J. Edgar Hoover FBI building is pictured in this July 1, 2005, file photo in Washington, DC. (AFP/Getty Images)
The FBI did not immediately respond to TheBlaze when asked for a comment.
(H/T: Gawker)
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