A few years earlier, the agency’s array of antenna dishes and listening posts - erected decades ago to intercept foreign radio, telephone and microwave signals - were proving steadily less useful in a world of digital packets, cellular providers and the Internet.
TAO was created in the late 1990s, as part of a reorganization inside NSA. Anyone seeking entrance into its lair had to get by an armed guard, a retinal scanner and a cipher-locked door. Located in a separate wing of NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., it was the subject of whispered rumors but little solid knowledge, even among those with otherwise high-security clearances. The ability to pull off this sort of feat had been evolving, over the previous 15 years, among an elite corps of superhackers in a division of the agency known as Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. When the hackers looked at their computer screens, the NSA could intercept the signals from those screens and watch what the hackers were watching - not in real time (unless there was a particular reason to be watching North Koreans in real time), but NSA analysts could retrieve the files, watch the images and analyze the evidence retroactively. Anything done on those networks, the NSA could follow. The real reason for the government’s certainty about the hacker’s identity - a reason no official could discuss publicly - was that the National Security Agency had long ago penetrated North Korea’s computer networks. Some computer experts were so unconvinced they wrote papers doubting that North Korea had anything to do with the hack a few speculated that it might have been an inside job by some disgruntled studio employee.īut the skeptics were wrong. The reasoning was circumstantial at best. In public, officials said they’d based their conclusion on the fact that the hackers used many of the same “signatures” that DarkSeoul had used in the past - the same encryption algorithms, data-deletion methods and Internet Protocol addresses. officials declared, with an unusual degree of confidence, that the hackers were with a group called DarkSeoul, which worked directly for the North Korean government. 17, 2014, three weeks after the massive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment - which destroyed 3,000 computers and pilfered 100 terabytes of data, the juiciest bits of which were distributed to an array of eager news reporters - senior U.S. In this exclusive excerpt, he goes behind the scenes of the December 2014 hack of Sony Pictures to show how a shadowy group of elite government superhackers, known as the Tailored Access Operations, knew with absolute certainty that the culprits were North Korean and then explains how this event opened a new front in the 21st century’s digital war. Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter Fred Kaplan tells this story for the first time in his new book Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (Simon & Schuster). military spends more than $14 billion a year on cyberwarfare. In 1983, after President Ronald Reagan saw War Games, the Matthew Broderick thriller about a teen who hacks into the NORAD computers and almost starts World War III, he asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Could this really happen?” The answer produced the first national security policy on cyberwarfare. The Cold War ended in 1989, but the age of cyberwar began six years before that. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe. This story first appeared in the March 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
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