The Untold Story of the Sony Hack: How North Korea's Battle With Seth Rogen and George Clooney Foreshadowed Russian Election Meddling in 2016

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/the-untold-story-of-the-sony-hack

By Rick Stengel
Vanity Fair
October 6, 2019

Sony employees who logged on to their desktops early on Monday morning, 
November 24, 2014, were greeted with the sound of digital gunfire and the image 
of an ominous red skeleton under the title “Hacked By #GOP,” which stood not 
for the Grand Old Party, but for a shadowy organization called Guardians of 
Peace. Below was a message that read, in not very good English, “We’ve already 
warned you, and this is just a beginning. We continue till our request be met. 
We’ve obtained all your Internal data Including your secrets and top secrets. 
If you don’t obey us, we’ll release [that] data.” It read like the opening of a 
bad script for a cyber-thriller.

But for Sony, the horror movie was just the beginning. Before the entire system 
went dark, the malware wiped out half of Sony’s global digital network. It 
junked 3,262 of Sony’s 6,797 personal computers and 837 of its 1,555 servers. 
Within hours, the global media giant was back in the 1980s, its employees using 
fax machines and pens and paper. The studio shop would only accept cash.

And it got worse. The hackers had actually been inside Sony’s system for weeks, 
and stolen all of Sony’s data before deleting it. Over the next month, they 
released nine batches of confidential files onto the public internet: 
everything from executives’ salaries to embarrassing emails about “no-talent” 
movie stars, to unfinished film scripts to actual unreleased films like Annie 
and Fury. Eventually all of the hacked emails were published by WikiLeaks.

Does that sound familiar? Two years later, in 2016, after we learned of 
Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign 
chairman John Podesta and their dark bargain with WikiLeaks to release that 
stolen information, it’s clear that the Sony hack foreshadowed not only the 
Russian attack on our election, but provided a panoramic vista of the modern, 
global information war. It’s all there. The vulnerability of major American 
institutions, the late and inept response of government, the press’s obsession 
with gossip that blinded them to a national-security threat, and a trampling of 
the First Amendment. Well, we were certainly unready when it happened in 2014. 
We were unready in 2016. And we seem barely more ready for 2020. Once again we 
have a candidate for president encouraging a foreign power to help him in his 
election campaign. Only now he’s president. The story of the Sony hack is worth 
reexamining as a model of modern information war, how we got it so wrong, and 
what we might do to prevent it from happening again.

[...]

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