Sony Movie Studio Computers Crippled By Apparent Cyberattack

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) has warned employees not to connect to corporate networks or access their email accounts after the Culver City, California-based movie studio was targeted by hackers on Monday.
According to Ryan Faughnder, Paresh Dave and Saba Hamedy of the Los Angeles Times, the attack has left all of SPE’s computer systems unusable, and employees who attempted to log in were met with an ominous image of a red skeleton before the system went dark.
“Staff from coast to coast couldn’t log on to computers or access email, bringing the workday to a crawl. They were reduced to using old-fashioned pen and paper to complete assignments and taking calls on landline telephones,” the reporters wrote. “Without specifying demands, the group warned Sony that it had obtained ‘secrets’ and threatened to leak them to the Web. The hackers said they would release internal information late Monday.”

Image Credit: Imgur
The images said that the company had been “Hacked by #GOP,” short for the group Guardians of Peace, according to Bloomberg reports, and while the apparent blackmail attempt is under investigation, the Los Angeles Times said that there appears to be no indication that the hacker followed through on their threats to release corporate data.
Todd Spangler, NY Digital Editor at Variety said that the warning indicated the group planned to divulge the information by 3pm Pacific time (6pm Eastern time) on Monday, and that it is not clear what their specific goals are. However, they claimed to have “all” of Sony’s “secrets,” and said that the hacking was “just the beginning.”
In addition, since-deleted tweets were posted to Sony-operated social media accounts specifically calling out CEO Michael Lynton. Russell Brandom of The Verge reported that the information obtained by the hackers included “a number of sensitive documents” which were listed in .zip files uploaded to URLs posted by the group.
“The documents named in the .zip file are widely varied, suggesting the attackers pulled the full contents of an employee server,” Brandom added. “Dozens of podcast mp3 files are named alongside potentially sensitive records and password files, the latter of which would explain how the group was able to commandeer so many Twitter accounts at once. There is already a Reddit thread devoted to piecing through the files.”
The company confirmed to reporters that it had been “investigating an IT issue” but would not elaborate. However, The Next Web said that an anonymous source had confirmed the hack was real, and that the attack started with a single compromised server in the movie studio’s network before spreading to other systems.
As Spangler pointed out, this is far from the first time that Sony has been targeted by hackers. In August, the company’s PlayStation Network (PSN) was taken down using a denial-of-service attack, and while no user data was compromised in that attack, a 2011 breach did expose the names and passwords of millions of PSN customers.
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