Who Unplugged North Korea From the Internet?

A new book reveals for the first time exactly what an elite group of government ops did after a ‘shockingly lax’ Sony, ‘protected by the lamest passwords— on the order of 12345,’ was hacked.

- Fred Kaplan

THE COLD WAR ENDED IN 1989, BUT the age of cyberwar began six years before that. 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. Today, the U.S. military spends more than $14 billion a year on cyberwarfare. 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). 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.

On Dec. 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. 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.