FBI talks with Tennessee man who copied style of Sony hackers' Pastebin posts and then mocked CNN
Kashmir Hill / Fusion :
Context & Ripple Effects
The FBI came into this conversation already on alert: days earlier it had issued a bulletin warning that the Sony attackers had threatened an unnamed news organization [[a:825007]], with CNN widely read as the likely target. Against that backdrop, a Tennessee man copying the hackers' distinctive Pastebin style and taunting CNN was exactly the kind of signal the Bureau could not ignore.
The talks also sit inside a fast-moving federal investigation — one the FBI Director would shortly say was aided by the attackers' own operational mistakes, with 'sloppy' North Korean hackers having exposed their IP addresses [[a:825235]]. Every new claimant speaking in the hackers' voice became another thread the Bureau had to pull.
First-order effects
- The Tennessee man is now directly engaged with the FBI, whose talks follow his imitation of the Sony hackers' Pastebin posts and public mockery of CNN.
- For CNN, the episode compounds an already-live threat picture: the FBI bulletin warning that the original hackers had threatened an unnamed news organization makes any message styled like theirs a matter of active concern.
Second-order effects
- The FBI's investigation now has to triage copycat claims alongside genuine ones — the Director's point that the real hackers exposed their own IP addresses [[a:825235]] gives investigators a way to test whether a claimant actually sits in that infrastructure or merely borrows its voice.
- News organizations watching the unnamed-outlet threat in the FBI bulletin face pressure to report and escalate lookalike messages quickly, since each imitation blurs whether the original attackers are still talking.
Third-order effects
- If high-profile breaches keep spawning imitators who borrow the hackers' voice, agencies will need standing methods to distinguish authentic threat actors from opportunists — turning attribution forensics like the IP-exposure evidence into routine screening rather than one-off detective work.
- The pattern points toward breach communications becoming part of the incident itself: whoever controls the Pastebin-style narrative — attackers, impostors, or targets responding — shapes how the FBI and the press allocate attention across a crisis.
The trend: As marquee hacks attract copycat claimants, law enforcement's job expands from finding the attackers to authenticating everyone else who speaks in their voice.