N.S.A. Breached North Korean Networks Before Sony Attack, Officials Say – NYTimes.com
Evidence gathered by software hidden by the N.S.A. to monitor North Korean activities proved critical in persuading President Obama to accuse the government of ordering the cyberattack on Sony, officials said.
I think it's clear at this point that Cyber Warfare is the new arms race. The NYT is reporting that the reason the US was so confident that North Korea was to blame for the Sony hacks is that the NSA had been hacking and implanting malware on North Korean hackers since 2010.
Clearly we need to take all of this very seriously, but this raises some questions for me. Should we be putting our resources into offensive strategies or defensive? If we're on the offense (breaking into other nation states) can we really lay blame when they get caught doing the same? If we get caught and they retaliate does this mean that we escalate into WWIII, just all IP based?