Not wanting to have ours or our allies' internet shut off in retaliation? Perhaps unsettling was a better adjective.
I read today it wasn't that hard, they mentioned it costing $20 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-...-internet-outage-network-researcher-says.html **** with Franco and the stoner's brigade will **** with you, probably Would be funky if NK didn't even do it and and a tift between some guys in basements starts a conflagration.
Obama doesn't need to "pay off" hackers. He has a much deeper pool of talent already on the payroll at the NSA. If they don't have cyber - war contingency plans in place involving misdirection regarding the source, I'd be amazed. Probably the same people who wrote Stuxnet. On BBC last night, I heard that NK's total bandwidth for the whole country is about 1/3 the size of Spamhaus, which was shutdown by some high school kid working alone from his bedroom. They have a single pipeline running in and out of the country via China.
Think about the Enigma Machine... if the NSA has the capability for cyberwar do you think they are going to use it for an attack on Hollywood? Or keep it secret till the DMZ lights up. Stuxnet kept neocons from bombing Iran, so that was pretty serious.
DDoS isn't exactly top secret. Same with some exploits. You could shut down NK without pulling out the big guns. White House promised a response, "Some of which you'll see, some of which you won't". For me, if this stretches out for a week or more, I will lean more and more to the government. Kids in mom's basement don't typically show that sort of tenacity . I think they could shut NK down without using anything super high tech and sensitive. The attacks yesterday followed almost immediately by Sony's reversal today makes me think maybe the administration has an understanding with Sony to box NK on the nose so they would have trouble following through on their threats and so they think twice about trying the same thing again the next time they have a temper tantrum. That is what I'd be thinking about were I in the White House - how do you make North Korea or other copycat countries think twice about trying the same again. As an aside, the "expert" guy on BBC said the first request they saw out of NK when the internet went back up last night was for a torrent for a pirated movie.
