Want more evidence about what happens when you have a president who is too weak and cowardly to DO something in the face of an attack? Look no further than the global disaster that is the WannaCry cyberattack, which is now being blamed on North Korea. The attack, experts say, bears several coding similarities to the 2014 Sony hack, which means it likely originated in the Kim Jong Un regime.
Barack Obama’s failure has once again been laid bare; he failed to act in the face of a direct threat, and now the Trump administration (along with many of our closest allies) is forced to clean up the mess.
The attack, which many experts fear is not over yet, has already taken more than 300,000 computers “hostage,” forcing organizations and individual users to pay a $300 Bitcoin ransom to unlock their Windows software. Both Kaspersky and Symantec have released statements saying that the code used in the WannaCry software was also found in the 2014 attack on Sony.
“This is the best clue we have seen to date as to the origins of WannaCry,” Kaspersky Lab researcher Kurt Baumgartner told Reuters.
The 2014 attack was believed to have been in response to Sony’s then-upcoming film, “The Interview,” which depicted comedy stars Seth Rogen and James Franco assassinating Kim Jong Un. The U.S. levied new sanctions against Pyongyang in the wake of the attack, but Obama seemed more concerned about Sony’s reaction, in which they canceled the theatrical release of the movie.
“I am sympathetic to the concerns that they face. Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake,” Obama said. “Let’s not get into that way of doing business. We cannot have a society in which some dictators someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States because if somebody is able to intimidate us out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing once they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like.”
Or imagine what they might do if they decided to unleash a global attack on transportation systems and government agencies…just for the sake of making money and wreaking international havoc. What might these victims have done to prevent the attack, one wonders.
Well, they could have updated their Windows software with the supplied patch last month, but let’s not digress.
The point is that Obama’s inaction in the face of such a threat allowed that threat to grow. This time, the damage was substantial but not catastrophic. But what happens when North Korea unleashes one of their nukes that the Obama administration was unable to block? Or Iran, for that matter?
We’re only five months past the final day of Obama’s presidency, and we’re already seeing the consequences of his terrible judgement come to pass.
