Sony fights back against hacker attack
“The Interview” poster. Captured from the movie information site IMDb.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is also investigating the incident, said one of the people who were not authorized to publicly discuss efforts to deal with the attack.
The computer systems at the Sony unit went down last Monday after displaying a red skull and the phrase “Hacked By #GOP,” which reportedly stands for Guardians of Peace, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The hackers also warned they would release “secrets” stolen from the Sony servers, the Times reported.
Technicians are making headway in repairing damage caused by the attack and expect to have the email systems back online Monday, said the source who commented on the FBI investigation.
Sony executives have declined to comment on the scope of the attack, though emails have been bouncing back with messages asking senders to call employees because the system was “experiencing a disruption.”
Representatives with FireEye and the FBI declined to comment.
Mandiant is an incident response firm that helps victims of breaches identify the extent of attacks, clean up networks and restore systems. The firm has handled some of the largest breaches uncovered to date, including the 2013 holiday attack on Target.
Technology news website Re/code reported on Friday that Sony was investigating to determine whether hackers working on behalf of North Korea have launched the attack in retribution for the studio’s backing of the film “The Interview,” which is to be released on Dec. 25 in the United States and Canada.
The movie is a comedy about two journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The Pyongyang government denounced the film as “undisguised sponsoring of terrorism, as well as an act of war” in a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
“The Interview” will not be released in South Korea, according to Sony Pictures Korea.
The distributor agreed with its American head office not to release the movie in the South, “considering the relations of the two Koreas,” the cable news channel YTN reported on Friday, quoting a Sony Pictures Korea representative. Reuters
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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