ATLANTA (WXIA) — President Barack Obama signed an executive order Friday that hit North Korea with more sanctions. It was in response to what the US says is the rogue nation’s role in a cyber-attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.
The White House says this is just the first part of the US response to the Sony incident. But one security expert in Atlanta is joining the chorus of those who say North Korea is not responsible for the attack.
“Everything pointed to an inside job,” said Gregory Evans. “Nothing pointed to North Korea.”
Evans is a hacker-turned-cyber-security expert. He says that from day one there was something about the Sony hack that smelled like an inside job.
“In order for them to have hacked in they would have had to know where those servers were, and they went undetected,” said Evans. “How in the world, when you have 1000 people working in your IT department, can someone hack in, hit all three servers, and go undetected. That’s like someone living in your house a whole month or two months and go undetected. You and your family don’t see this guy walking around your house.”
Evans says North Korea is notorious for a lot of things but hacking like a super-power is not one of them.
“They don’t even have a good bandwidth in their country; that’s why it was very easy a week ago to knock their internet offline. A group of hackers could’ve done that.”
Meanwhile, the FBI and the White House are standing by their accusation that North Korea was to blame for the Sony attacks. But Evans insists that’s because they have no choice.
“They can’t go back now after blaming North Korea, having given this information to the President and the President going out saying it was North Korea. They can’t go back and say ‘…oops, we messed up.’ So they have to stick to their lie.”
“And just remember this: (The FBI) wanted you to believe that they cracked the case in less than two weeks; but they still haven’t told you who hacked Target a year ago or Home Depot eight months ago. They still haven’t told you that.”
Evans also does not believe that North Korea “hired out” the job to cyber subcontractors. But either way, trying to verify whoever it was is going to be close to impossible. Even those who take credit for such attacks.
