Sony plays "Whac-a-Mole" as North Korea gets back online
Update (12/23, 12:30pm): Since taping the video above, Sony has reportedly allowed certain cinemas including The Alamo Drafthouse and the Plaza Atlanta to screen 'The Interview' on December 25th as originally intended.
Internet service is back up and running in North Korea after a nine-hour outage on Monday, but who pulled the plug?
U.S. officials deny Washington was involved. President Obama said at a news conference on Friday that the United States will "respond proportionally" to the attack on Sony (SNE) and that the U.S. would do so “in a place and time and manner that we choose.’’ He did not give specifics.
Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman doesn’t believe the U.S. had any responsibility because it "doesn’t make sense,” he says. “You don’t always want your enemy to know what you’re capable of, and these are capabilities we may actually need in a real wartime scenario,” says Newman.
According to The New York Times, North Korea has only 1,024 official Internet protocol addresses, but the actual number may be a little higher.
China is also rejecting rumors it had anything to do with North Korea's internet outage. China said Tuesday while it condemns all forms of cyber attacks, there is no proof that North Korea was responsible for the hack at Sony Pictures.
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The U.S. has asked China for help in the investigation of the Sony hack, but a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry said Tuesday the U.S. and North Korea needed to communicate directly. China is North Korea's only major ally and would be a major asset to the U.S. in any investigation of North Korea.
Despite the official reluctance from China, Newman says “there are signs from inside China they are just getting so fed up with the outbursts and the kind of adolescent behavior coming out of North Korea." He says, "It’s making life harder for China...In a way you could almost see this as a backlash forming against North Korea that might work to the advantage of everyone but North Korea.”
As U.S. investigators continue efforts to uncover who is behind the hack, Sony is threatening Twitter (TWTR) with legal action. It has asked Twitter to block tweets relating to material obtained in the hack and to suspend the accounts of those posting any hacked material. Sony’s attorney David Boies wrote a letter to Twitter specifically citing one Twitter user with the handle @BikiniRobotArmy. The letter said that Sony “does not consent to Twitter's or any Twitter account holder's possession, review, copying, dissemination, publication, uploading, downloading, or making any use of the stolen information.”
This is a situation Twitter and other social media outlets have found themselves in before and will inevitably find themselves in again. Newman says, “They are running around after the horses have left the barn, saying ‘okay all this information is out there, don’t publicize it.’” He likens it to the posting and reposting of nude celebrity photos in a hack earlier this year. “This is hugely problematic,” he says. “This is whack-a-mole times a million.”
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