Actually, Rolex and a lot of others care deeply about that. In Italy, the Guardia Finanzia has units financed by Gucci, D&G, et al. that go after counterfeiters from the top on down to chasing street peddlers. It's all about how much you care about your reputation.

>That said, reprisals are a terrible idea.

Who needs reprisals? They're stuck in North Korea. What could be worse? The Dear Leader is a bat-shit crazy reincarnation of Stalin. Half the country is starving to death. Even if your are relatively well off, you could be taken out and shot any minute, and every known relative of yours hauled off to a camp for generations.

Of course they have top notch cyber techs. The Dear Leader needs access to the latest in 4K pron video.

Because freedom in North Korea would be the worstest thing ever.

Yeah, because Flash drives are such a secure way to move data...

I'm assuming that Sony, being a very large multinational company, has a very large Intranet, which means at various points its going to be traversing the open Internet at various points.

Unless you're advocating Sony lay down its own fiber and then turn off its gateway routers....

I'd be interested in knowing the details of the attack. Was it a "social engineering" attack of some kind (ie. a virus-laden email that someone with high privileges opened)? Was it a vulnerability in their networks? I've heard someone with high level admin privileges had their account hacked, but in what way was it done?

The organization I work for is a contractor for the government of a North American jurisdiction, and yesterday morning I started getting reports that some sort of virus-laden emails were flowing out of this government's networks. Sure enough, within a half an hour, I got emails from a contact I have within this particularly agency, with an attached ZIP file with an SCR file inside. That has to be one of the oldest ways that malware has been transmitted in Windows system, I saw my first virus-laden SCR file somewhere around 1997-1998.

Apparently this critter is so new that by the time we checked, only a few AV companies had caught on to it. Even worse in some ways is that it appears that it made its debut on the very government servers in question, making me think this was a targeted attack. So you have a combination of a brand new virus of some kind that won't get caught by the scanners, lax email rules that allow the opening and execution of executable file types (not that blocking EXE variants doesn't mean some bastard won't be firing off a compromised PDF at an unpatched system), and users who through a combination of laziness and ignorance happily take the final step.

With this particular attack, there would have been no problem if Outlook had been configured not to open these kinds of attachments, and in an Active Directory environment, that's pretty trivial, so some of the blame has to go to this government agency's IT team. But still, even with the best safeguards, where users just happily click on any old attachment, it doesn't exactly take a rare alignment of the stars to have malware planted in a network. Sure, it won't have root privileges and won't be able to propagate itself via more sophisticated means, but it appears in this case it didn't need to.

So I do agree to some point that there are finite limits to what any person or organization can do to secure itself against a determined and directed attack. But there are ways to make such attacks much more difficult, and more quickly captured before they wreak too much harm.

The minute Microsoft made Activesync sufficiently robust, BB's cause célèbre evaporated.

Remember when RIM opened up its network so the Saudi and Indian governments could spy on BB users....

Judging by sales, that group is pretty damned small and it is very questionable that it is large enough to keep the company afloat.

Go pump BB's stock somewhere else.

How do we have to threaten to get all of these movies nuked?

Yes, because the terrifying North Korean hit squads will nuke the theatre in Whitefish, Montana as soon as the movie starts. They will also hit every other theatre in the US at the same time. Since there are maybe two movie theaters in all of PRNK, they probably think it's the same here.

Thank goodness a movie like Life of Brian wasn't released in these knee-trembling times.

I can imagine what is going through the heads of many Korean War vets, that MacArthur should have been allowed to march right into Manchuria.