Sony Pictures hacked: the full story – The Verge

Sony Pictures reaches settlement with former employees in hack lawsuit

2015-09-02T20:20:25-04:00

Sony Pictures has reached a settlement with former employees in a lawsuit related to the devastating hack it suffered 10 months ago, a breach which saw large amounts of sensitive company information leaked online. The lawsuit, which is still pending class-action certification in a hearing set later this month, is a combination of seven different lawsuits brought by former employees whose social security numbers, medical records, and other sensitive personal information were part of the data dump.

Details of the settlement were not disclosed. Sony and the plaintiffs have asked that the class-action certification be pushed back 45 days while …

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An Oscar-nominated documentary team is working on a film about the Sony hacks

2015-06-02T15:02:01-04:00

Here we go. In the first of what's sure to be many, a documentary about the Sony hacks is currently in the works from Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, the team who made the 2013 Oscar-nominated (and Emmy Award-winning) doc The Square.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the movie is expected to explore alternative theories as to who actually hacked Sony, shut down their servers, and leaked massive troves of emails from high-ranking executives like former Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal. The FBI and White House have named North Korea as the perpetrator, although many in the security community have questioned that conclusion and called for more …

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Wikileaks has published the complete Sony leaks in a searchable database

2015-04-16T14:10:44-04:00

Today, Wikileaks published a database of all of the data leaked from Sony Pictures in last year's hack, comprising 173,132 emails and 30,287 separate documents. The documents contain private legal opinions as well as sensitive conversations between executives, many of which were the subject of reports in the wake of the hack. "This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a statement. "It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geo-political conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there."

"This archive shows the inner workings of an …

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Amy Pascal speaks about the Sony hacks, calls actors ‘bottomless pits of need’

2015-02-12T14:14:23-05:00

Amy Pascal spoke publicly yesterday for the first time since stepping down as the chief of Sony Pictures, Recode reports. At the Women in the World conference in San Francisco, Pascal talked openly, if vaguely, about the Sony hacks, pay inequality, and needy Hollywood stars.

"What am I doing here?"

The conversation, moderated by former Newsweek editor Tina Brown, started off slowly as Pascal questioned the need for a public discussion. "Everyone knows everything about me," she said. "What am I doing here?"

That's a fair enough question, but Pascal is not out of the public eye yet. She announced this week that she'll join the production team …

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Sony will spend $15 million to deal with cyberattack fallout

2015-02-04T01:37:48-05:00

Sony was meant to announce its third quarter earnings today, but since the catastrophic cyberattack directed at Sony Pictures took out much of its accounting equipment, the company is only able to issue approximate guidance for now. And there's at least some good news: the company estimates it made a net profit of ¥89 billion ($756 million) between October and December, up 238 percent from a year earlier.

Operating profit is forecast at ¥178.3 billion ($1.51 billion), and revenue is expected to have increased 6 percent year on year to ¥2.56 trillion ($21.7 billion). Sony has revised its forecast for the financial year ending in March; it st …

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Sony Pictures expects to have some critical systems back online in early February

2015-01-23T04:06:04-05:00

Sony has announced that it's applying for an extension of the deadline to submit its third-quarter securities report "due to the amount of destruction and disruption that occurred" following the massive cyberattack directed against its movie division. Sony Pictures shut down its network in response to the hack, but most of the financial systems and "many other critical information technology applications" won't be back online until early February. The Wall Street Journal reported at the end of December that the Sony Pictures network would be "fully operating again within eight weeks" if the company's systems stayed secure.

As such, the thir …

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New report claims zero-day attack on Sony Pictures

2015-01-20T09:43:40-05:00

The tools involved in the Sony Pictures attack may have been more sophisticated than we thought. Recode's Arik Hessedahl is reporting that the attackers employed a previously undisclosed vulnerability to break into the Sony Pictures system, according to "sources familiar with the Sony investigation." Also known as a zero-day vulnerability, undisclosed weaknesses are particularly valuable in the security world, and typically employed by nation-state attackers. It's unclear how central the exploit was to the attack or which system was found to be vulnerable. Much of the previously reported software involved in the attack had been re-used from …

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The NSA was tracking North Korea’s hackers long before they attacked Sony Pictures

2015-01-19T05:52:57-05:00

Intelligence gathered by the National Security Agency on North Korea more than four years ago led the US government to blame Pyongyang for the recent attack on Sony Pictures, according to a report from The New York Times. The report, citing former US officials, computer experts, and documents leaked last week by Edward Snowden, says the NSA used malware to track North Korean hackers as part of a program launched in 2010. That allowed the government to blame North Korea with unusual speed and certainty following December's hack on Sony Pictures, but the report also sheds light on how Pyongyang's hackers were able to get away with it in the fi …

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The Interview is coming to Blu-ray and DVD on February 17th

2015-01-14T14:30:29-05:00

It was only a matter of weeks ago when Sony Pictures Entertainment sheepishly admitted it had no plans to release The Interview after suffering a massive data breach - reportedly at the hands of North Korea. It's pretty incredible how much has changed since then. We've seen the Seth Rogen / James Franco comedy make its way through a limited theatrical run, pushed out to every video-on-demand service known to man, and now we'll be getting a physical media release to close it all out. Today, Sony Pictures announced that The Interview will come to Blu-ray and DVD on February 17th. It's being packaged in a cheekily-named "Freedom Edition," which …

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The NSA helped trace the Sony attacks back to North Korea

2015-01-09T16:49:34-05:00

The NSA played a large role in tracing the Sony hacks back to North Korea, according to recent statements by the NSA director. Speaking at a cybersecurity conference in Manhattan today, Admiral Michael Rogers confirmed that the NSA's signals intelligence had been employed as part of the search for the Sony hackers. "We partner with the Department of Homeland Security and FBI in various areas and this is one such area," Rogers told reporters. "We were asked to provide our technical expertise. We were asked to take a look at the malware. We were asked to take a look at not just the data that was being generated from Sony but also what data cou …

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