New Research Blames Insiders, Not North Korea, for Sony Hack - TIME
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Stylometry is the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language, but it has successfully been applied to music[1] and to fine-art paintings[2] as well.
Stylometry is often used to attribute authorship to anonymous or disputed documents. It has legal as well as academic and literary applications, ranging from the question of the authorship of Shakespeare's works to forensic linguistics.
History[edit]
Stylometry grew out of earlier techniques of analyzing texts for evidence of authenticity, authorial identity, and other questions. An early example is Lorenzo Valla's 1439 proof that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, an argument based partly on a comparison of the Latin with that used in authentic 4th Century documents.
The modern practice of the discipline received major impetus from the study of authorship problems in English Renaissance drama. Researchers and readers observed that some playwrights of the era had distinctive patterns of language preferences, and attempted to use those patterns to identify authors in uncertain or collaborative works. Early efforts were not always successful: in 1901, one researcher attempted to use John Fletcher's preference for "'em," the contractional form of "them," as a marker to distinguish between Fletcher and Philip Massinger in their collaborations—but he mistakenly employed an edition of Massinger's works in which the editor had expanded all instances of "'em" to "them".[3]
The basics of stylometry were set out by Polish philosopher Wincenty Lutosławski in Principes de stylométrie (1890). Lutosławski used this method to build a chronology of Plato's Dialogues.
The development of computers and their capacities for analyzing large quantities of data enhanced this type of effort by orders of magnitude. The great capacity of computers for data analysis, however, did not guarantee quality output. In the early 1960s, Rev. A. Q. Morton produced a computer analysis of the fourteen Epistles of the New Testament attributed to St. Paul, which showed that six different authors had written that body of work. A check of his method, applied to the works ofJames Joyce, gave the result that Ulysses was written by five separate individuals, none of whom had any part in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.[4]
In time, however, and with practice, researchers and scholars have refined their approaches and methods, to yield better results. One notable early success was the resolution of disputed authorship in twelve of The Federalist Papers by Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace.[5] While questions of initial assumptions and methodology still arise (and, perhaps, always will), few now dispute the basic premise that linguistic analysis of written texts can produce valuable information and insight. (Indeed, this was apparent even before the advent of computers: the successful application of a textual/linguistic approach to the Fletcher canon by Cyrus Hoy and others yielded clear results in the late 1950s and early '60s.) An example of a modern study is the analysis of Ronald Reagan's radio commentaries of uncertain authorship.[6] The stylometric analysis of the controversial, pseudonymously authored book Primary Colors, performed by Vassar professor Donald Foster[7] in 1996, brought the field to the attention of a wider audience after correctly identifying the author asJoe Klein.
Methods[edit]
Modern stylometry draws heavily on the aid of computers for statistical analysis, artificial intelligenceand access to the growing corpus of texts available via the Internet. Software systems such as Signature[8] (freeware produced by Dr Peter Millican of Oxford University), JGAAP[9] (the Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program—freeware produced by Dr Patrick Juola of Duquesne University), stylo[10] (an open-source R package for a variety of stylometric analyses, including authorship attribution) and Stylene[11] for Dutch (online freeware by Prof Walter Daelemans of University of Antwerp and Dr Véronique Hoste of University of Ghent) make its use increasingly practicable, even for the non-expert.
Whereas in the past, stylometry emphasized the rarest or most striking elements of a text, contemporary techniques can isolate identifying patterns even in common parts of speech.
Writer invariant[edit]
The primary stylometric method is the writer invariant: a property held in common by all texts, or at least all texts long enough to admit of analysis yielding statistically significant results, written by a given author. An example of a writer invariant is frequency of function words used by the writer.
In one such method, the text is analyzed to find the 50 most common words. The text is then broken into 5,000 word chunks and each of the chunks is analyzed to find the frequency of those 50 words in that chunk. This generates a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk. These numbers place each chunk of text into a point in a 50-dimensional space. This 50-dimensional space is flattened into a plane using principal components analysis (PCA). This results in a display of points that correspond to an author's style. If two literary works are placed on the same plane, the resulting pattern may show if both works were by the same author or different authors.
Neural networks[edit]
Neural networks have been used to analyze authorship of texts. Text of undisputed authorship are used to train the neural network through processes such as backpropagation, where training error is calculated and used to update the process to increase accuracy. Through a process akin to non-linear regression, the network gains the ability to generalize its recognition ability to new texts to which it has not yet been exposed, classifying them to a stated degree of confidence. Such techniques were applied to the long-standing claims of collaboration of Shakespeare with his contemporaries Fletcher and Christopher Marlowe,[12][13] and confirmed the view, based on more conventional scholarship, that such collaboration had indeed taken place.
A 1999 study showed that a neural network program reached 70% accuracy in determining authorship of poems it had not yet analyzed. This study from Vrije Universiteit examined identification of poems by three Dutch authors using only letter sequences such as "den".[14]
One problem with this method of analysis is that the network can become biased based on its training set, possibly selecting authors the network has more often analyzed.[14]
Genetic Algorithms[edit]
The genetic algorithm is another artificial intelligence technique used in stylometry. This involves a method that starts out with a set of rules. An example rule might be, "If but appears more than 1.7 times in every thousand words, then the text is author X". The program is presented with text and uses the rules to determine authorship. The rules are tested against a set of known texts and each rule is given a fitness score. The 50 rules with the lowest scores are thrown out. The remaining 50 rules are given small changes and 50 new rules are introduced. This is repeated until the evolved rules correctly attribute the texts.
Rare Pairs[edit]
One method for identifying style is called "rare pairs", and relies upon individual habits of collocation. The use of certain words may, for a particular author, idiosyncratically entail the use of other, predictable words.
See also[edit]
- Jump up ^ Westcott, Richard (15 June 2006). "Making hit music into a science". BBC News.
- Jump up ^ "Internet Archive Wayback Machine". <a href="http://Web.archive.org" rel="nofollow">Web.archive.org</a>. 2006-06-30. Retrieved 2012-10-15.
- Jump up ^ Samuel Schoenbaum, Internal evidence and Elizabethan dramatic authorship; an essay in literary history and method, p. 171.
- Jump up ^ Samuel Schoenbaum, Internal evidence and Elizabethan dramatic authorship; an essay in literary history and method, p. 196.
- Jump up ^ F. Mosteller and D. Wallace (1964). Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist.Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
- Jump up ^ Edoardo M. Airoldi, Stephen E. Fienberg, Kiron K. Skinner (July 2007). "Whose Ideas? Whose Words? Authorship of Ronald Reagan's Radio Addresses". PS: Political Science & Politics 40(3): 501–506. doi:10.1017/S1049096507070874.
- Jump up ^ Author Unknown by Gavin McNett Salon November 2, 2000
- Jump up ^ "The Signature Stylometric System". PhiloComp. Retrieved 2014-01-03.
- Jump up ^ "JGAAP". JGAAP. 2012-09-04. Retrieved 2012-10-15.
- Jump up ^ "stylo". CSG. 2014-10-24. Retrieved 2014-10-24.
- Jump up ^ Daelemans, Walter and Hoste, Véronique (2013). STYLENE: an Environment for Stylometry and Readability Research for Dutch (Technical report). CLiPS Technical Report Series.ISSN 2033-3544. 4.
- Jump up ^ [1] Neural Computation in Stylometry I: An Application to the Works of Shakespeare and Fletcher Matthews RAJ & Merriam TVN Lit Linguist Computing (1993) 8 (4): 203-209. doi: 10.1093/llc/8.4.203
- Jump up ^ [2]Neural Computation in Stylometry II: An Application to the Works of Shakespeare and Marlowe Merriam TVN & Matthews RAJ Lit Linguist Computing (1994) 9 (1): 1-6
- ^ Jump up to: a b JF HoornZ, SL Frank, W Kowalczyk and F van der Ham (2012-09-03). "Neural network identification of poets using letter sequences". <a href="http://Llc.oxfordjournals.org" rel="nofollow">Llc.oxfordjournals.org</a>. Retrieved 2012-10-15.
References[edit]
- Can F, Patton JM (2004). "Change of writing style with time". Computers and the Humanities 38 (1): 61–82. doi:10.1023/b:chum.0000009225.28847.77.
- Hope, Jonathan (1994). The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Hoy C (1956–62). "The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon". Studies in Bibliography 7–15.
- Juola, Patrick (2006). "Authorship Attribution". Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval 1: 3.doi:10.1561/1500000005.
- Kenny, Anthony (1982). The Computation of Style: An Introduction to Statistics for Students of Literature and Humanities. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
- Romaine, Suzanne (1982). Socio-Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Samuels, M. L. (1972). Linguistic Evolution: With Special Reference to English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Schoenbaum, Samuel (1966). Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship: An Essay in Literary History and Method. Evanston, IL, USA: Northwestern University Press.
- Greenstadt R. "Practical Attacks Against Authorship Recognition Techniques". Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence.
- Brocardo, Marcelo Luiz; Issa Traore; Sherif Saad; Isaac Woungang (2013). "Authorship Verification for Short Messages Using Stylometry". IEEE Intl. Conference on Computer, Information and Telecommunication Systems (CITS).
Further reading[edit]
See also the academic journal Literary and Linguistic Computing (published by the University of Oxford) and the Language Resources and Evaluation journal.
External links[edit]
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Science of Stylometry a Weapon Against Hackers, Trolls ...
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[PDF]Adversarial stylometry - Computer Science - Drexel University
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Introduction to Stylometric Analysis using R | Digital ...
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[PDF]Explanation in Computational Stylometry - CLiPS
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<a href="mailto:walter.daelemans@ua.ac.be">walter.daelemans@ua.ac.be</a>. Abstract. Computational stylometry, as in authorship attribution or profiling, has a large potential for applications in diverse areas: ...
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A number of private security researchers are increasingly voicing doubts that the hack of Sony‘s computer systems was the work of North Korea.
President Obama and the F.B.I. last week accused North Korea of targeting Sony and pledged a “proportional response” just hours before North Korea’s Internet went dark without explanation. But security researchers remain skeptical, with some even likening the government’s claims to those of the Bush administration in the build-up to the Iraq war.
Fueling their suspicions is the fact that the government based its findings, in large part, on evidence that it will not release, citing the “need to protect sensitive sources and methods.” The government has never publicly acknowledged doing so, but the National Security Agency has begun a major effort to penetrate North Korean computer networks.
Because attributing the source of a cyberattack is so difficult, the government has been reluctant to do so except in the rarest of circumstances. So the decision to have President Obama charge that North Korea was behind the Sony hack suggested there is some form of classified evidence that is more conclusive than the indicators that the F.B.I. made public on Friday. “It’s not a move we made lightly,” one senior administration official said after Mr. Obama spoke.
Still, security researchers say they need more proof. “Essentially, we are being left in a position where we are expected to just take agency promises at face value,” Marc Rogers, a security researcher at CloudFlare, the cloud security company, wrote in a post Wednesday. “In the current climate, that is a big ask.”
Mr. Rogers, who doubles as the director of security operations for DefCon, an annual hacker convention, and others like Bruce Schneier, a prominent cryptographer and blogger, have been mining the meager evidence that has been publicly circulated, and argue that it is hardly conclusive.
For one, skeptics note that the few malware samples they have studied indicate the hackers routed their attack through computers all over the world. One of those computers, in Bolivia, had been used by the same group to hack targets in South Korea. But that computer, as well as others in Poland, Italy, Thailand, Singapore, Cyprus and the United States, were all freely available to anyone to use, which opens the list of suspects to anyone with an Internet connection and basic hacking skills.
For another, Sony’s attackers constructed their malware on computers configured with Korean language settings, but skeptics note that those settings could have been reset to deflect blame. They also note the attackers used commercial software wiping tools that could have been purchased by anyone.
They also point out that whoever attacked Sony had a keen understanding of its computer systems — the names of company servers and passwords were all hard-coded into the malware — suggesting the hackers were inside Sony before they launched their attack. Or it could even have been an inside job.
And then there’s the motive. Government officials claim the Sony attacks were retaliation for “The Interview,” a feature film about two bumbling journalists hired by the C.I.A. to assassinate North Korea’s leader. In a letter last June, North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations called the film “an act of war.” But naysayers point out that, as far as they can tell, Sony’s attackers did not mention the film as motivation until that theory percolated in the media.
The simpler explanation is that it was an angry “insider,” Mr. Rogers wrote. “Combine that with the details of several layoffs that Sony was planning, and you don’t have to stretch the imagination too far to consider that a disgruntled Sony employee might be at the heart of it all.”
Some of these claims contradict one another. Why, some question would the attackers use Korean language settings simply to throw off forensics specialists, but mention the film only after the media had?
On Wednesday, one alternate theory emerged. Computational linguists at Taia Global, a cybersecurity consultancy, performed a linguistic analysis of the hackers’ online messages — which were all written in imperfect English — and concluded that based on translation errors and phrasing, the attackers are more likely to be Russian speakers than Korean speakers.
Such linguistic analysis is hardly foolproof. But the practice, known as stylometry, has been used to contest the authors behind some of history’s most disputed documents, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers.
Shlomo Argamon, Taia’s Global’s chief scientist, said in an interview Wednesday that the research was not a quantitative, computer analysis. Mr. Argamon said he and a team of linguists had mined hackers’ messages for phrases that are not normally used in English and found 20 in total. Korean, Mandarin, Russian and German linguists then conducted literal word-for-word translations of those phrases in each language. Of the 20, 15 appeared to be literal Russian translations, nine were Korean and none matched Mandarin or German phrases.
Mr. Argamon’s team performed a second test of cases where hackers used incorrect English grammar. They asked the same linguists if five of those constructions were valid in their own language. Three of the constructions were consistent with Russian; only one was a valid Korean construction.
“Korea is still a possibility, but it’s much less likely than Russia,” Mr. Argamon said of his findings.
Even so, Taia Global’s sample size is small. Similar computerized attempts to identify authorship, such as JStylo, a computerized software tool, requires 6,500 words of available writing samples per suspect to make an accurate finding. In this case, hackers left less than 2,000 words between their emails and online posts.
It is also worth noting that other private security researchers say their own research backs up the government’s claims. CrowdStrike, a California security firm that has been tracking the same group that attacked Sony since 2006, believes they are located in North Korea and have been hacking targets in South Korea for years.
But without more proof, skeptics are unlikely to simply demur to F.B.I. claims. “In the post-Watergate post-Snowden world, the USG can no longer simply say ‘trust us’,” Paul Rosenzweig, the Department of Homeland Security’s former deputy assistant secretary for policy, wrote on the Lawfare blog Wednesday. “Not with the U.S. public and not with other countries. Though the skepticism may not be warranted, it is real.”
Mr. Rosenzweig argued that the government should release more persuasive evidence.
“Otherwise it should stand silent and act (or not) as it sees fit without trying to justify its actions. That silence will come at a significant cost, of course — in even greater skepticism. But if the judgment is to disclose, then it must be more fulsome, with all the attendant costs of that as well.”
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Clues from an investigation of the hack of Sony Pictures now point to at least one former employee, according to Norse Security.
A strong counter-narrative to the official account of the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment has emerged in recent days, with the visage of the petulant North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, replaced by another, more familiar face: former Sony Pictures employees angry over their firing during a recent reorganization at the company.
Researchers from the security firm Norse allege that their investigation of the hack of Sony has uncovered evidence that leads, decisively, away from North Korea as the source of the attack. Instead, the company alleges that a group of six individuals is behind the hack, at least one a former Sony Pictures Entertainment employee who worked in a technical role and had extensive knowledge of the company’s network and operations.
[Read Security Ledger coverage of the hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment.]
If true, the allegations by Norse deal a serious blow to the government’s account of the incident, which placed the blame squarely on hackers affiliated with the government of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, or DPRK. That accusation, first aired last week, has been the source of heated rhetoric from both Washington D.C. and Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
Speaking to The Security Ledger, Kurt Stammberger, a Senior Vice President at Norse, said that his company identified six individuals with direct involvement in the hack, including two based in the U.S., one in Canada, one in Singapore and one in Thailand. The six include one former Sony employee, a ten-year veteran of the company who was laid off in May as part of a company-wide restructuring.
Stammberger said that Norse’s team of around nine researchers started from the premise that insiders would be the best situated to carry out an attack on the company and steal data. The company analyzed human resources documents leaked in the hack and began researching employees with a likely motive and means to carry out a hack.
That HR data was the “golden nugget” in the investigation, revealing the details of a mass layoff at Sony in the Spring of 2014, including a spreadsheet identifying employees who were fired from Sony Pictures in the April-May time period.
After researching those individuals, Norse said it identified one former employee who he described as having a “very technical background.” Researchers from the company followed that individual online, noting angry posts she mad e on social media about the layoffs and Sony. Through access to IRC (Internet Relay Chat) forums and other sites, they were also able to capture communications with other individuals affiliated with underground hacking and hacktivist groups in Europe and Asia.
According to Stammberger, the Norse investigation was further able to connect an individual directly involved in those online conversations with the Sony employee with a server on which the earliest known version of the malware used in the attack was compiled, in July, 2014.
Stammberger was careful to note that his company’s findings are hardly conclusive, and may just add wrinkles to an already wrinkled picture of what happened at Sony Pictures. He said Norse employees will be briefing the FBI on Monday about their findings.
“They’re the investigators,” Stammberger said. “We’re going to show them our data and where it points us. As far as whether it is proof that would stand up in a court of law? That’s not our job to determine, it is theirs,” he said of the FBI.
At a minimum, the latest theory suggest that official accounts of the hack from U.S. government sources are now just one among many competing theories about the source of motivation behind the attack that are circulating within security circles and in the mainstream media. This, ten days after the Obama Administration pinned the blame for the destructive attack squarely on hackers affiliated with the reclusive government of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK).
The sheer amount of information leaked by the hackers has provided plenty of ammunition to fuel alternative narratives about what happened. Initial reports noted that the malware used in the attacks on Sony was created on systems that used Korean language software libraries, and shared similarities with malicious software used in destructive attacks on the Saudi oil firm Saudi Aramco.
But for every clue that seems to point to the involvement of the DPRK, there are others that point in other directions, as well. For example, recent analysis has focused on date and time stamps attached to the leaked Sony data. Researchers have used those time stamps to infer the speed with which the data was transferred off Sony’s network. Reports have suggested that the timestamp data points to a data leak within Sony’s enterprise network, for example: to a USB device or external hard drive.
Other analysis studied clues buried in statements made by the shadowy hacking crew, the Guardians of Peace or GOP, who claimed responsibility for the attacks. Email addresses and other ephemera from the GOP communications with Sony and the outside world have been read to reveal links to everything from Japanese anime and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers television show to U.S.domestic disputes over politics and gender equality. Further, linguistic analysis of GOP’s online communications suggests they were penned by someone who is a native Russian speaker, not a native Korean (or English) speaker.
But the Norse account of the hack does answer some puzzling questions about the incident that are as yet unexplained, according to Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor and a principal at Rasch Technology and Cyberlaw. Among those questions: how hackers were able to obtain near-perfect knowledge of Sony Pictures’ network and, then, sneak terabytes of data off of the network without arousing notice.
“It has always been suspicious that it was North Korea,” Rasch said. “Not impossible – but doubtful…It made a lot more sense that it was insiders pretending to be North Korea.”
Rasch noted, as others have, that the attackers initially made no mention of the Sony Pictures film “The Interview” in communications with the company or the outside world. Rasch notes that the hackers also exhibited a somewhat sophisticated knowledge of how Hollywood works – leaking data that was deeply personal and particularly embarrassing to Sony executives.
Stammberger notes the involvement of an insider would explain how the attackers obtained critical information about Sony’s network, including the IP addresses of critical servers and valid credentials to log into them. Even in sophisticated attacks, remote actors might spend days, weeks or months probing a network to which they have gained access to obtain that information: using compromised employee accounts to explore and find sensitive data before stealing it or causing other damage. It is during that “lateral movement,” malicious actors are often spotted, Stammberger said. In the case of the Sony hack, however, the malware was compiled knowing exactly what assets to attack.
Still, there are many questions that have yet to be answered. Norse’s own analysis has plenty of blank spaces. Stammberger said that a “handful” of former employees may have been involved, though only one was linked directly to the hack. That employee, at some point, joined forces with external actors and more experienced hackers with a grudge against Sony, including individuals involved with sites like the Pirate Bay which offer Hollywood movies for download. “We see evidence for those two groups of people getting together,” Stammberger told The Security Ledger.
Author: Paul
I'm an experienced writer, reporter and industry analyst with a decade of experience covering IT security, cyber security and hacking, and a fascination with the fast-emerging "Internet of Things."
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A leading cyber security firm says it has evidence that contradicts the government’s allegation that North Korea was behind the debilitating cyber attacks against Sony Pictures.
Researchers from the firm Norse told Security Ledger, an independent security news website, that they believe that a group of six individuals orchestrated the hack, including at least one former employee who was laid off in company-wide restructuring in May.
The latest allegations add to growing skepticism over the FBI’s assertion — reiterated by President Barack Obama — that linked North Korea to the attack, which the country has denied. A recent linguistic analysis cited in the New York Times found that the hackers’ language in threats against Sony was written by a native Russian speaker and not a native Korean speaker.
“For every clue that seems to point to the involvement of the DPRK, there are others that point in other directions, as well,” the Security Ledger reports.
Read more at the Security Ledger.
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