More evidence has emerged that makes the Sony Pictures hack look similar to a suspected attack on South Korean companies over a year ago. And a spokesperson for the North Korean government, rather than denying his country’s involvement, is playing coy as the damage to Sony appears to be growing daily.
When contacted by the BBC, a spokesperson for North Korea’s mission to the United Nations said, "The hostile forces are relating everything to [North Korea]. I kindly advise you to just wait and see."
Sony Pictures’ computers were reportedly the victim of wiper malware which erased all the data on infected PCs and the servers they were connected to. As Ars reported yesterday, this is similar to the attack on two South Korean broadcasters and a bank that was launched in 2013. As security reporter Brian Krebs reports, the FBI sent out a “Flash Alert” to law enforcement warning of a cyber attacker using “wiper” malware this week—malicious software that erases the entire contents of the infected machine’s hard drives as well as the contents of the master boot record of the computer. The FBI shared a Snort intrusion detection signature for the malware file, and as Krebs noted, "the language pack referenced by the malicious files is Korean."
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