North Korea has a despotic, feudal monarchy, the House of Kim. They are global pariahs and so the West tries to encapsulate and isolate them. The North Korean conduct continuous acts of aggression against others and have developed nuclear weapons to threaten the world with. Now it looks like they (or someone with their interests) have committed a cyber attack against Sony Pictures in an attempt to prevent their absurd leader from being ridiculed. In this, as matters now stand, they have succeeded.

Basically this is a terrorist act against the commercial interests of the West. If it is allowed to succeed it means that any rogue state or organisation can hold the West to ransom. For our rights and freedoms this is incredibly serious. Far more so than ISIS running amok in Syria and Iraq.

I wrote an article on here in 2011 saying that we need a Cyber Command. Now you can clearly see why this is so.

There is a simple way out for Sony. They can publish the film in, say, four episodes, dripping with adverts, on YouTube. Almost immediately the movie will be viewed by hundreds of millions of people and North Korea will have lost. Also the revenue will be significant.

Cyber warfare is not new. In 2007 the Estonian government removed a Soviet era statue from Tallinn which prompted the Russian hackers to attack. So powerful and sustained was this that virtually the whole internet for the whole country had to be closed down. Then in 2008 Putin’s Russia invaded Georgia (they are still illegally occupying a lot of that country) and once again the internet was used as a weapon, many websites were attacked and there was widespread chaos.

More recently the terrorist USA government and the terrorist Israeli government attacked Iran with the Stuxnet worm, designed to sabotage that country’s totally legal nuclear programme. So any criticism the USA government makes of North Korea is hypocritical in the extreme.

The world now is facing a new paradigm of what warfare, aggression and terrorism are. Events will redefine these and lay down whole new codes of international conduct. But, as with much military aggression, you can be sure that the West will often be the bad guy.