THR Cover: Sony hack, five years later — what really happened?
The massive cyberattack just before Thanksgiving 2014 crippled a studio, embarrassed executives and reshaped Hollywood. The FBI blamed a North Korea scheme to retaliate for the comedy 'The Interview,’ but many whose lives were upended have doubts. Says Seth Rogen:"The fact that [co-director Evan Goldberg and I] were never really specifically targeted always raised suspicions in my head.
That was followed by 22 days of massive data dumps that exposed embarrassing executive email exchanges , trade secrets and five upcoming full-length films . The breach, which former National Intelligence director James Clapper dubbed "the most serious cyberattack ever made against U.S. interests," rocked the industry and forever altered how studios think about cybersecurity and the global impact of their content. In the aftermath, nearly all of Sony's top management was swept out.
Many, including Lynton, who left the studio in 2017 and now is chairman of Snap Inc., do accept the official explanation. "I believe the experts, and the experts told me it was North Korea. I have no reason to believe otherwise," he says. Through a studio spokesperson, Sony says, "We have no reason to suspect anything other than what the FBI concluded based on their investigation. The studio has moved on.
"I said, 'Look, before you jump on the North Korea bandwagon, I'm getting these documents from a Russian hacker who seems to have unlimited ability to pull more documents, even after Sony's network was down.' Literally after their network was in shambles, this guy was still able to send me documents," says Carr. As for the government's reaction, Carr notes: "The FBI doesn't give you a response.
It is, of course, very possible that Russian hackers never actually breached any Sony corporate accounts and instead these additional emails were stolen from employees' personal accounts . There also was at least one other break-in of the studio's system nine months before the infamous public hack in 2014.
Former News Corp. chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam says there are major holes in the theory that North Korea carried out the hack as payback for. "North Korea would have needed someone on the ground — an almost impossible-to-imagine scenario that also contradicts the criminal complaint — in order to exfiltrate that much data, including at least five full-length movies, without anyone noticing at Sony," he says.
Some skeptics say that pushing back on the government's narrative came with a reputational cost. Marc Rogers, who is head of security at famed hacking conference Defcon and a consultant on, says he took heat from the government for knocking down the Pyongyang angle and noting that North Korean proxy IP addresses don't necessarily translate into a smoking gun.
Gabelli & Company's John Tinker, a Wall Street analyst who covers Sony, says the nefarious investor angle is possible and that it's happened before. For instance, there was an attempted bombing against publicly traded German soccer team Borussia Dortmund. "It was originally said to be terrorism," says Tinker. "But [investigators later said] it was someone who shorted the stock and had basically hoped to kill the team. The stock would collapse.
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