2014 Sony Pictures hack

On November 24, 2014, the hacker group "Guardians of Peace" leaked confidential data from the film studio Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE).

The film stars Rogen and James Franco as journalists who set up an interview with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un only to then be recruited by the CIA to assassinate him.

[4][5][6] United States intelligence officials, after evaluating the software, techniques, and network sources used in the hack, concluded that the attack was sponsored by the government of North Korea, which has since denied all responsibility.

[14] In addition to the activation of the malware on November 24, the message included a warning for Sony to decide on their course of action by 11:00 p.m. UTC that evening, although no apparent threat was made when that deadline passed.

[14] In the days following this hack, the Guardians of Peace began leaking yet-unreleased films and started to release portions of the confidential data to attract the attention of social media sites, although they did not specify what they wanted in return.

Yet it is exactly the kind of behavior we have come to expect from a regime that threatened to take 'merciless countermeasures' against the U.S. over a Hollywood comedy, and has no qualms about holding tens of thousands of people in harrowing gulags.

On December 8, 2014, alongside the eighth large data dump of confidential information, the Guardians of Peace threatened Sony with language relating to the September 11 attacks that drew the attention of U.S. security agencies.

[14][17] North Korean state-sponsored hackers are suspected by the United States of being involved in part due to specific threats made toward Sony and movie theaters showing The Interview, a comedy film about an assassination attempt against Kim Jong-un.

[23] Although personal data may have been stolen, early news reports focused mainly on celebrity gossip and embarrassing details about Hollywood and film industry business affairs gleaned by the media from electronic files, including private email messages.

[26][27][28][29] The two had suggested they should mention films about African-Americans upon meeting the president, such as Django Unchained, 12 Years a Slave and The Butler, all of which depict slavery in the United States or the pre-civil rights era.

[30] The leak revealed multiple details of behind-the-scenes politics on Columbia Pictures' current Spider-Man film series, including emails between Pascal and others to various heads of Marvel Studios.

[37] In December 2014, former Sony Pictures Entertainment employees filed four lawsuits against the company for not protecting their data that was released in the hack, which included Social Security numbers and medical information.

[42] Sony condemned the WikiLeaks publication and their attorneys responded by saying it "indiscriminately" disseminated stolen data, and that this "conduct rewards a totalitarian regime seeking to silence dissident speech".

[43][44][45][46] In November 2015, after Charlie Sheen publicly announced in a television interview that he was diagnosed with HIV, it was revealed that Sony executives were aware of the diagnosis as early as March 10, 2014, even though he never told them about it.

The other, posted to Pastebin, a web application used for text storage that the Guardians of Peace had used for previous messages, stated that the studio had "suffered enough" and could release The Interview, but only if Kim Jong-un's death scene was not "too happy".

[70] On December 27, the North Korean National Defence Commission released a statement accusing Obama of being "the chief culprit who forced the Sony Pictures Entertainment to indiscriminately distribute the movie.

[7] White House officials treated the situation as a "serious national security matter",[72] and the FBI formally stated on December 19 that they connected the North Korean government to the cyber-attacks.

[81] A disclosed NSA report published by Der Spiegel stated that the agency had become aware of the origins of the hack due to their own cyber-intrusion on North Korea's network that they had set up in 2010, following concerns of the technology maturation of the country.

[85] Some days after the FBI's announcement, North Korea temporarily suffered a nationwide Internet outage, which the country claimed to be the United States' response to the hacking attempts.

[90] On the same day, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry published his remarks condemning North Korea for the cyber-attack and threats against movie theatres and moviegoers.

[101] Former hacker Hector Monsegur, who once hacked into Sony, explained to CBS News that exfiltrating one or one hundred terabytes of data "without anyone noticing" would have taken months or years, not weeks.

"[103] Stammberger believes that the security failure may have originated from six disgruntled former Sony employees, based on their past skill sets and discussions these people made in chat rooms.

"[107] In response to allegations that the intrusion was the result of an inside job, or something other than a state-sponsored cyber attack, computer forensic specialist Kevin Mandia, president of the security firm FireEye, commented that there was not a "shred of evidence" that an insider was responsible for the attack and that the evidence uncovered by his security firm supports the position of the United States government.

The report, published in collaboration with Kaspersky Lab, Symantec, AlienVault, Invincea, Trend Micro, Carbon Black, PunchCyber, RiskIQ, ThreatConnect and Volexity, concluded that a well-resourced organization had committed the intrusion, and that "we strongly believe that the SPE attack was not the work of insiders or hacktivists".

The Department of Justice contends that Park was a North Korean hacker that worked for the country's Reconnaissance General Bureau, the equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency.

[119] American screenwriter Aaron Sorkin wrote an op-ed for The New York Times opining that the media was helping the hackers by publishing and reporting on the leaked information.

The decision to pull the film was criticized by several Hollywood filmmakers, actors, and television hosts, including Ben Stiller, Steve Carell, Rob Lowe, Jimmy Kimmel and Judd Apatow.

[122][123] Some commentators contrasted the situation to the non-controversial release of the 2004 Team America: World Police, a film that mocked the leadership of North Korea's prior leader, Kim Jong-il.

[124] The Alamo Drafthouse was poised to replace showings of The Interview with Team America until the film's distributor Paramount Pictures ordered the theaters to stop.

[125] In light of the threats made to Sony over The Interview, New Regency cancelled its March 2015 production plans for a film adaptation of the graphic novel Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, which was set to star Steve Carell.