nov 24, 2014 - 2014 Sony Pictures hack

Description:

On November 24th, 2014, the hacker group "Guardians of Peace" leaked confidential data from the film studio Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE). The data included employee emails, personal and family information, executive salaries, copies of then-unreleased films, future film plans, screenplays, and other information. The perpetrators then employed a variant of the Shamoon wiper malware to erase Sony's computer infrastructure.

During the hack, the group demanded that Sony withdraw its then-upcoming film The Interview, a political satire action comedy film produced and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. 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. The hacker group threatened terrorist attacks at cinemas screening the film, resulting in many major U.S. theater chains opting not to screen The Interview. In response to these threats, Sony chose to cancel the film's formal premiere and mainstream release, opting to skip directly to a downloadable digital release followed by a limited theatrical release the next day.

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. Among the information revealed in the emails was that Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai pressured Sony Pictures co-chairwoman Amy Pascal to "soften" the assassination scene in The Interview. Many details relating to the actions of the Sony Pictures executives, including Pascal and Michael Lynton, were also released, in a manner that appeared to be intended to spur distrust between these executives and other employees of Sony.

According to a notice letter dated December 8th, 2014, from SPE to its employees, SPE learned on December 1st, 2014 that personally identifiable information about employees and their dependents may have been obtained by unauthorized individuals as a result of a "brazen cyber-attack", including names, addresses, Social Security numbers and financial information. On December 7th, 2014, C-SPAN reported that the hackers stole 47,000 unique Social Security numbers from the SPE computer network.

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.

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