FBI talks with Tennessee man who copied style of Sony hackers' Pastebin posts and then mocked CNN
Kashmir Hill / Fusion :
Context & Ripple Effects
Days after FBI bulletins warned that the Sony attackers had threatened an unnamed news organization warned an unnamed news organization, a Tennessee man began posting in the hackers' Pastebin style and taunting CNN — close enough to the real thing that the FBI opened talks with him. The episode lands amid an unresolved attribution fight, where the FBI director has staked the case on the hackers' own operational mistakes, calling them 'sloppy' for exposing their IP addresses.
First-order effects
- CNN, already the subject of an FBI threat warning aimed at an unnamed news outlet, now faces copycat taunting that forces it to treat every Pastebin post as potentially real.
- The FBI must spend investigative resources separating one imitator from the actual North Korean-linked crew before its attribution narrative hardens.
Second-order effects
- Impersonation erodes the evidentiary value of the hackers' public claim posts — the very channel news organizations were warned about — pushing reporters and targets to weigh technical forensics over pasted messages.
Third-order effects
- If mimicry keeps polluting claim channels, breach attribution will lean increasingly on network-level evidence like exposed IPs rather than the attackers' own statements — the direction the FBI director was already arguing.
The trend: As public claim channels become trivially easy to imitate, breach attribution is shifting from what hackers post to what their infrastructure leaks.