http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/01/heres-how-sony-is-going-to-make-up-for-the-psn-outage/

Missing Mt Gox Bitcoins Likely an Inside Job, Say Japanese Police
http://www.coindesk.com/missing-mt-gox-bitcoins-inside-job-japanese-police/

A member of the hacker group that claimed responsibility for the Christmas Day shutdown of Sony and Microsoft’s gaming networks has been arrested.

Vinnie Omari, a 22-year-old member of the group Lizard Squad, was arrested on Monday after British law enforcement agents from the South East Regional Organized Crime Unit raided his home. Omari confirmed the raid with the Daily Dot, and provided a photo of the search warrant he received.

“They took everything,” Omari told the Daily Dot in an email. “Xbox one, phones, laptops, computer USBs, etc.”

A press release from the Thames Valley Police confirms that a 22-year-old man was arrested Monday “on suspicion of fraud by false representation and Computer Misuse Act offense.”

Lizard Squad took credit for the Dec. 25 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live.

Federal authorities insist that the North Korean government is behind the cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Cybersecurity experts? Many are not convinced.

From the time the hack became public Nov. 24, many of these experts have voiced their suspicions that a disgruntled Sony Pictures insider was involved.

Respected voices in the online security and anti-hacking community say the evidence presented publicly by the FBI is not enough to draw firm conclusions.

They argue that the connections between the Sony hack and the North Korean government amount to circumstantial evidence. Further, they say the level of the breach indicates an intimate knowledge of Sony’s computer systems that could have come from someone on the inside.

“We can’t find any indication that North Korea either ordered, masterminded or funded this attack,” Kurt Stammberger, a senior vice president at Norse, said in an interview with The Times.

President Obama this month said North Korea was behind the Sony attack and pledged a “proportional” response. North Korea’s Internet suffered outages in the days following the announcement. The U.S. hasn’t taken responsibility for the outages, but North Korea has blamed Obama.

But analysts said attribution in cyberattacks is difficult, and hackers are skilled in obfuscation and misdirection to avoid getting caught. Also, software-wiping technology used by the so-called Guardians of Peace group against Sony is widely available to hackers and can be easily purchased. Many were surprised that the FBI made its announcement so quickly.

“You don’t want to jump to conclusions in a cyberattack,” said Rob Sloan, head of cybercontent and data at Dow Jones. “Attributing attacks is really a non-scientific art.”

Even skeptics who doubt the attack was state-sponsored said the FBI may have more convincing evidence that it has chosen to keep secret.

FBI Investigating Whether Companies Are Engaged in Revenge Hacking
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-30/fbi-probes-if-banks-hacked-back-as-firms-mull-offensives.html

The hacked are itching to hack back.

So say a dozen security specialists and former law-enforcement officials, who described an intensifying and largely unspoken sense of unease inside many companies after the recent breach of Sony Corp. (6758)’s networks.

U.S. officials have shown little appetite to intervene as banks, retailers, casinos, power companies and manufacturers have been targeted by foreign-based hackers. Private-sector companies doing business in the U.S. have few clear options for striking back on their own.

That has led a growing number of companies to push the limits of existing law to consider ways to break into hackers’ networks to retrieve stolen data or even knock computers offline to stop attacks, the cybersecurity professionals said in interviews. Some companies are enlisting cybersecurity firms, many with military or government security ties, to walk them through options for disrupting hacker operations or peering into foreign networks to find out what intellectual property hackers may have stolen.