An Exclusive Look at Sony’s Hacking Saga

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/02/sony-hacking-seth-rogen-evan-goldberg

BY MARK SEAL
Vanity Fair
March 2015

At 8:30 A.M. on November 24, the Monday before Thanksgiving, Amy Pascal 
arrived in her office in the Thalberg building, on the Sony Pictures lot, 
in Culver City, California. Pascal, 56, is among the most powerful people 
in Hollywood. Having spent 35 years in the trenches—from low-level 
secretary to her current job as co-chairman of Sony Pictures 
Entertainment, the global television-digital-and-motion-picture 
conglomerate—she has earned the expansive third-floor office that was 
occupied by studio head Louis B. Mayer, in the 1930s and 1940s, when the 
Sony lot was the domain of mighty Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Mayer was known 
as “the Lion of Hollywood.” It was on these soundstages and movie sets 
that Atlanta was burned in Gone with the Wind and Dorothy followed the 
Yellow Brick Road to Oz. Since Sony and a consortium of investors 
purchased MGM, in 2005, its films have earned 142 Academy Award 
nominations, 10 of them for best picture.

The studio’s secrets were safe in Mayer’s day, when they died within the 
walls of a soundproof telephone room adjoining his office. Pascal believed 
she didn’t need the soundproof room. Like everyone else in the 
entertainment industry these days, she communicated through e-mail that 
was believed to be secure. But this morning, as she began her day, she 
discovered that a bizarre specter had hijacked her computer. The screen 
glowed with a blood-red skeleton baring its fangs, and the words “Hacked 
By #GOP.”

Superimposed over the skeleton was an ominous warning:

  We’ve obtained all your internal data including your secrets and top
  secrets.

  If you don’t obey us, we’ll release data shown below to the world.

The “data” below consisted of five links that would turn out to be the 
internal records of the entertainment giant.

Pascal thought it was a joke. Still, she called Michael Lynton, 55, Sony 
Pictures’ C.E.O. and chairman, who occupies an office down the hall. He 
and Pascal have been a team for nearly a decade now; Lynton handles 
administration and business affairs, leaving Pascal free to deal with the 
creative side of making movies.

[...]

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