The result of the extensive investigation performed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) led to a published conclusion a few days ago that North Korea was responsible for the recent messy cyber attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment (click here if you missed our report on this).
However, in recent days, several security experts have come forward with suggestions saying that hackers from North Korean may actually not be involved at all in this messy hack or only partially responsible, and all fingers are pointing to this attack being an inside job.
One of the Security Experts who came up recently was Kurt Stammberger, a senior vice president with the Cybersecurity firm ‘Norse‘ and he said “We are very confident that this was not an attack master-minded by North Korea and that insiders were key to the implementation of one of the most devastating attacks in history, Sony was not just hacked, this is a company that was essentially nuked from the inside,” Stammberger explained. The security firm further found evidence that “a group of six individuals is behind the hack, at least one a former Sony Pictures Entertainment employee who worked in a technical role and had extensive knowledge of the company’s network and operations.”
According to Stammburger, he believes that a woman who is a former Sony employee and goes by the name “Lena” was a major player in this attack. He also reported that this woman was with Sony Pictures for 10 years before she was laid off in May 2014.
“This woman was in precisely the right position and had the deep technical background she would need to locate the specific servers that were compromised,” Stammberger confirmed. He believes this woman’s position within the company was high enough and would have allowed her to have enough knowledge and access required to plan and put together such an attack.
“There are certainly North Korean fingerprints on this but when we run all those leads to ground they turn out to be decoys or red herrings,” Stammberger said.