Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and
Speaker 1: I love all things tech. And for today's show, I
Speaker 1: thought I would cover kind of an infamous thing that
Speaker 1: happened in tech a few years ago. So in hackers
Speaker 1: infiltrated the computer systems of Sony Pictures and they stole
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of data. This was one of the
Speaker 1: highest profile incidents of hacking in that decade, and it
Speaker 1: involves everything from political posturing to the studio of Sony
Speaker 1: waffling over whether or not it was actually going to
Speaker 1: release a movie. So I thought we could revisit that
Speaker 1: story kind of walk through you to see what we
Speaker 1: know about it and what we suspect, or maybe it
Speaker 1: might be more accurate to say, you know, what is
Speaker 1: the official stance of the FBI, and what do other
Speaker 1: people think, and also what has happened since, including how
Speaker 1: the people accused of being behind the attack also stand
Speaker 1: accused of other cyber crimes. And I should point out
Speaker 1: that early on a lot of these details um around
Speaker 1: the hack. I mean even now, they still remain unknown,
Speaker 1: or at least if they are known, the folks who
Speaker 1: know it are kind of keeping it to themselves. And
Speaker 1: you know, there's a lot of speculation out there, with
Speaker 1: conflicting accounts as to when things got started, why the
Speaker 1: hack happened, and who is behind the whole ding dang
Speaker 1: darn thing. There's even a suspect whom an entire country
Speaker 1: insists does not actually exist. So it's a legit mystery,
Speaker 1: including conspiracy theories and enormous consequences. But let's begin with
Speaker 1: the morning of Monday, November twenty four, two thousand fourteen.
Speaker 1: Sony Pictures employees come in to go to work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they boot up their machines and they see something that
Speaker 1: could have come straight out of a Sony Pictures film.
Speaker 1: In fact, it feels like something straight out of the
Speaker 1: nineties movie A red Skeleton Cartoons skeleton appears on their
Speaker 1: computer screen, and then their computer speaker system plays the
Speaker 1: sounds of gun shots, and there's a message that pops
Speaker 1: up that says hacked by hashtag g O P. Now
Speaker 1: for Americans, that might have caused a little bit of
Speaker 1: confusion because here in America, GOP typically stands for Grand
Speaker 1: Old Party. It's another name for the Republican Party, the
Speaker 1: one commonly associated with conservative political views here in the
Speaker 1: United States. But that was not the GOP behind this attack.
Speaker 1: This GOP stood for Guardians of Peace. As to who
Speaker 1: was behind that, well, it's obviously a big part of
Speaker 1: the mystery. There was a further bit to this message.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just hacked by hashtag g OP. It read quote,
Speaker 1: We've already warned you, and this is just a beginning.
Speaker 1: We continue till our request be met. We've obtained all
Speaker 1: your internal data, including your secrets and top secrets. If
Speaker 1: you don't obey, us will release data below to the world.
Speaker 1: Determine what will you do? Till November two p m
Speaker 1: g MT End quote. Then there were data links to
Speaker 1: a list of the assets the hackers had stolen from
Speaker 1: Sony's systems. Employees found that pretty much every aspect of
Speaker 1: their network was inaccessible. Voicemail was offline, the telephone directory
Speaker 1: in general was gone. There was no way to access
Speaker 1: the Internet, and even the cafeteria couldn't connect to credit
Speaker 1: card verification services, which meant all transactions had to be
Speaker 1: cash only that day, not just that day either. This
Speaker 1: lasted a while so never mind trying to access something
Speaker 1: off of Sony's servers. Before lunchtime, news of the hack
Speaker 1: had already broken online, with outlets like geek dot com
Speaker 1: and Deadline reporting on it straight away. Sony employees found
Speaker 1: themselves unable to do any work or they had to
Speaker 1: switch to you know, like pen and paper or white
Speaker 1: boards in an old school approach to trying to to
Speaker 1: do anything productive in the face of a massive attack.
Speaker 1: In fact, when it was all said and done, Sony
Speaker 1: had to wait until February of twift to get systems
Speaker 1: back online, so you know, that's like more than a
Speaker 1: month of the systems being down. They had to retire
Speaker 1: three thousand, two hundred sixty two employee PCs that's how
Speaker 1: of six thousand, seven nine seven total, so almost half
Speaker 1: of all computers had to be replaced, and had to
Speaker 1: do the same with eight hundred thirty seven out of
Speaker 1: one thousand, five hundred fifty five servers, so more than
Speaker 1: half of their servers had to be replaced. This is
Speaker 1: all according to a Vanity Fair article titled The Untold
Speaker 1: Story of the Sony Hack by Richard Stingle. At the
Speaker 1: time of the hack, Stingle was actually working for US
Speaker 1: Secretary of State and had a direct connection as he
Speaker 1: was friends with the the then CEO of Sony Pictures.
Speaker 1: According to Sony itself, as reported by computer World, the
Speaker 1: hack represented a thirty five million dollar cost in I
Speaker 1: T repairs. That was the figure quoted for quote restoring
Speaker 1: our financial and I T systems end quote according to
Speaker 1: a Sony spokesperson, And that actually sounds low to me.
Speaker 1: And of course there were other monitor are damages as
Speaker 1: well due to how the hackers would release much of
Speaker 1: that stolen information online. And then there's the damage to
Speaker 1: Sony's reputation, a rep that already had more than a
Speaker 1: little tarnish on it before the hack even happened. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the details of the attack included links that the hackers
Speaker 1: left behind two sites that showed off some of the
Speaker 1: data they had taken, So this was more of like
Speaker 1: a directory of what was stolen, with the actual data
Speaker 1: itself to follow in the weeks to come. As it
Speaker 1: would turn out, the hackers who had infiltrated the system
Speaker 1: had been hard at work inside Sony's cyber walls for
Speaker 1: at least a few weeks at the point where they
Speaker 1: left this message, and some accounts suggest that the initial
Speaker 1: intrusion might have happened even more than a year in
Speaker 1: advance because of just the enormous amount of information that
Speaker 1: got siphoned away. But either way, this was not some
Speaker 1: sort of hasty message that was sent immediately after the
Speaker 1: hackers got access to the system. Now, the hackers had
Speaker 1: clearly already copied a vast amount of information, which again
Speaker 1: depending on the account, ranged anywhere from forty gigabytes to
Speaker 1: around a hundred terra bytes or more, a truly astonishing
Speaker 1: amount of information. They also deleted files on Sony's systems
Speaker 1: and then they sent the message. So it's only after
Speaker 1: they had siphoned off the data and burned everything behind
Speaker 1: them that they tipped their hand that they were involved.
Speaker 1: So yeah, this was the moment where the world at
Speaker 1: large learned about the attack, But again, it had clearly
Speaker 1: happened or at least started before November. In fact, this
Speaker 1: wasn't even the first attack on Sony's computer systems in
Speaker 1: and the company had a history of cybersecurity issues which
Speaker 1: did not make it look particularly strong. Let's go back
Speaker 1: to April of two thousand eleven, and don't worry, this
Speaker 1: bit is just a quick overview to set the stage,
Speaker 1: and this is going to focus not on Sony Pictures,
Speaker 1: but another branch of Sony. So in two ten, there
Speaker 1: was a security hacker named George Hots, a k a.
Speaker 1: Geo Hot, and he became the target of Sony's ire
Speaker 1: after Geo Hot started working on a method to breach
Speaker 1: the PlayStation three consoles security in order to unlock the
Speaker 1: console so that you could do all sorts of different
Speaker 1: stuff with it. You could hack it, in other words,
Speaker 1: and and really use that special hardware of the PS
Speaker 1: three to tackle specific types of computational problems, because the
Speaker 1: architecture of the PS three was very different from other
Speaker 1: consoles at the time. Sony brought some legal action against Hots,
Speaker 1: who had pointed out a pretty massive flaw in Sony's
Speaker 1: own security, and then Anonymous got involved. And you don't
Speaker 1: hear about Anonymous as much these days as used to.
Speaker 1: But it's it's a loosely organized activist group and there's
Speaker 1: usually no identifiable leadership within the group itself, and members
Speaker 1: can have drastically different philosophies and approaches, So you can
Speaker 1: have like concerned activists to nihilistic anarchists in that same group.
Speaker 1: Anonymous named Sony a prime target for hacking in response
Speaker 1: to how Sony was pursuing hots and what followed was
Speaker 1: a distributed denial of service or d d o S
Speaker 1: attack on Sony's PlayStation network servers, which interrupted service for
Speaker 1: millions of Sony PlayStation owners. Sony would actually end up
Speaker 1: taking the network offline entirely on April twenty while looking
Speaker 1: for a way to counter the attacks. Later the world
Speaker 1: learned that a you know, leading up to Sony taking
Speaker 1: down the PlayStation network, hackers had actually infiltrated Sony systems
Speaker 1: and accessed a database containing user data for seventy seven
Speaker 1: million accounts, including people's names, their email addresses, their past
Speaker 1: words they're log in. There was a question about maybe
Speaker 1: their credit card information got leaked as well, something that
Speaker 1: Sony said did not happen. But this was just the
Speaker 1: beginning of Sony's woes. Different groups of hackers, most of
Speaker 1: which were using fairly unsophisticated tools, attacked Sony Online Entertainment,
Speaker 1: Sony websites, and numerous other Sony sites and services, so
Speaker 1: they weren't necessarily coordinating with one another, but rather kind
Speaker 1: of all acting on an opportunity that presented itself. And
Speaker 1: this isn't to suggest that the people behind these attacks
Speaker 1: in eleven were linked to the ones we saw in fourteen,
Speaker 1: but rather to point out that Sony as a company
Speaker 1: had truly atrocious cybersecurity systems and practices in place. This
Speaker 1: was in so you would think that after that experience
Speaker 1: of being hit by these attacks, that Sony would really
Speaker 1: beef up security considerably and make future attack its less likely.
Speaker 1: I mean, you would think that, but you'd be wrong.
Speaker 1: According to multiple sources, Sony systems had poor password protection,
Speaker 1: like super poor like according to the Hollywood Reporter, some
Speaker 1: servers had passwords like Sony pictures, which you know, is
Speaker 1: not great, not super secure, And the fact that security
Speaker 1: was so poor meant that the list of possible perpetrators
Speaker 1: would be really, really big, big enough so that even
Speaker 1: when the FBI would announce a suspect that being hackers
Speaker 1: connected to North Korea, there was enough doubt among the
Speaker 1: security community to raise questions about it. All right, so
Speaker 1: let's get back to our timeline. The Hollywood Reporter article
Speaker 1: titled five years Later, Who Really Hacked Sony includes the
Speaker 1: fact that, according to leaked internal emails at Sony, the
Speaker 1: company discovered an earlier breach inteen. That's the February one,
Speaker 1: and the keep in mind that the big hack, the
Speaker 1: one that we're really focused on in this episode, would
Speaker 1: take place later that year in November. But in that
Speaker 1: February hack, there was a fear that the hackers managed
Speaker 1: to secure the credentials to get administrative control of a
Speaker 1: Sony Pictures system, potentially uploading malware into the system in
Speaker 1: the process, and as we just covered, Sony's security wasn't
Speaker 1: really up to code. Now, I tried to track down
Speaker 1: more information about this February two, fourteen hack and came
Speaker 1: up empty. Now it's possible that this was something that
Speaker 1: Sony just tried to contain completely internally and it just
Speaker 1: never went beyond those internal emails. At any rate, it
Speaker 1: is very challenging to search for anything related to Sony
Speaker 1: and hacking that happened in that doesn't relate to the
Speaker 1: more notorious event that happened in November. However, there's one
Speaker 1: thing I do have to talk about that happened between
Speaker 1: February and November that does play into the story, and
Speaker 1: that's the Interview. The Interview is a film. It's a
Speaker 1: comedy that was developed by Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg
Speaker 1: about a TV journalist and his producer getting a gig
Speaker 1: to come to North Korea and interview the country's leader,
Speaker 1: Kim Jong Un. Only they are intercepted by members of
Speaker 1: the c i A who want to use this rare
Speaker 1: opportunity to assassinate Kim Jong Un, turning the vacuous Hollywood
Speaker 1: types into state backed assassins. Seth Rogan and James Franco
Speaker 1: played the producer and the TV host, respectively. Randall Park
Speaker 1: a k agent, Jimmy Wou and the m c U
Speaker 1: played Kim Jong Un. The film went into production in
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen with Sony Pictures behind it, and the
Speaker 1: release date was set for October of two thousand fourteen.
Speaker 1: So in the summer of two thousand fourteen, when the
Speaker 1: movie's publicity was starting to get all the ground, that's
Speaker 1: when there were rumblings from North Korea. The media. North
Speaker 1: Korea condemned the film months before it was set to premiere,
Speaker 1: calling for Sony to not release it and even to
Speaker 1: just destroy the movie, and that the release of the
Speaker 1: movie would be considered an act of terrorism and war. Now,
Speaker 1: on the one hand, the Interview is a pretty dumb movie.
Speaker 1: It's it's not a hard hitting thriller. It doesn't say
Speaker 1: anything particularly insightful about North Korea or Kim Jong un.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, it's pretty darn taboo to
Speaker 1: make a fictional film about a planned assassination of a
Speaker 1: real world person who is very much still alive. I mean,
Speaker 1: it has been done, but it's a tricky thing to do. Honestly,
Speaker 1: I think if someone were to make a movie about
Speaker 1: trying to assassinate me, I'd take it a little personally.
Speaker 1: Sony pushed back the release of the film from October
Speaker 1: to Decen two thousand fourteen, the idea of being of
Speaker 1: releasing it on Christmas Day, and they also made some
Speaker 1: changes to the movie. Now, whether these changes were meant
Speaker 1: as concessions to North Korea or not, I don't know,
Speaker 1: but there's a pretty solid story of the company easing
Speaker 1: back on the death scene of Kim Jong un. Spoiler alert.
Speaker 1: He does die in the movie. He gets blown to
Speaker 1: smithereens when his helicopter is hit with a shot from
Speaker 1: a Franco driven tank, and apparently in the version that
Speaker 1: they filmmakers originally created, that death scene was far more
Speaker 1: graphic than it is in the finished film. Well, North
Speaker 1: Korean media was pushing rhetoric that suggested that release of
Speaker 1: the film would lead to disastrous consequences, and Sony pushed
Speaker 1: back the date but still planned to release the film.
Speaker 1: And then in November, the other shoe dropped, or at
Speaker 1: least it appeared too. I'll explain more after we take
Speaker 1: this break. Before the break, I said that the other
Speaker 1: shoe appeared to drop. And the reason I used that
Speaker 1: wishy washy language is that when it comes to what happened,
Speaker 1: there's some stuff we can say for sure and some
Speaker 1: stuff we have to kind of guess at what. When
Speaker 1: it comes to the stuff we can say for sure,
Speaker 1: we can summari rise like this. You know, hackers definitely
Speaker 1: got access to Sony systems. They definitely stole information, and
Speaker 1: we know this because they later posted that information online,
Speaker 1: frequently using Pastebin to do so. Pastebin is a plain
Speaker 1: text content hosting service, So you can post the code
Speaker 1: to something in plain text on a paste bind service,
Speaker 1: but you can't host you know, streaming media or you know,
Speaker 1: working files or anything like that. You could post the
Speaker 1: code to a file, but you wouldn't be able to,
Speaker 1: you know, have an execute he able file in pace
Speaker 1: bin format. So the hackers released lots of stuff over
Speaker 1: the weeks following the attack, much of which appeared to
Speaker 1: be aimed specifically at harming Sony. More on that in
Speaker 1: a little bit as well. On November, just three days
Speaker 1: after the hack, someone in that hacker group made available
Speaker 1: five Sony films on online file sharing hubs, and they
Speaker 1: included four films that had not yet even been released
Speaker 1: to theaters, proving that this was part of the information
Speaker 1: stolen during the hack. The four unreleased films were Annie,
Speaker 1: Mr Turner, to Write Love on Her Arms and Still Alice.
Speaker 1: The fifth film, Fury starring Brad Pitt, was already in
Speaker 1: its theatrical run at the time. The hackers also definitely
Speaker 1: wiped Sony systems, using legit tools to erase and overwrite
Speaker 1: data to make it extremely difficult to retrieve. Now, you
Speaker 1: probably know that when you delete a file from your
Speaker 1: hard drive, that information does not just magically disappear. It's
Speaker 1: not like it's gone. It's not like using in a
Speaker 1: racer to erase away stuff you've written. The information is
Speaker 1: actually still there on your hard drive, at least until
Speaker 1: your hard drive overwrites the old data with new data.
Speaker 1: So essentially your hard drive flags the drive space where
Speaker 1: you're deleted files are, and it says this is fair game.
Speaker 1: So whenever we have to write new data, you can
Speaker 1: do it here if you want to. But until the
Speaker 1: computer actually does write new information to that section of
Speaker 1: the hard drive, that data can sometimes be retrieved with
Speaker 1: tools like the ones that the hackers used, this process
Speaker 1: gets cut off, and that's because these tools they first
Speaker 1: delete data on a drive, then they overwrite the drives
Speaker 1: with gibberish. So this is what you might use. If
Speaker 1: you wanted to wipe a personal computer before you sold
Speaker 1: it or traded it in or or recycled it or whatever,
Speaker 1: you would go through this process, and then you don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about whether or not you overlooked a
Speaker 1: folder that contained personal information in it, because this type
Speaker 1: of tool essentially nukes it from orbit, because it's the
Speaker 1: only way to be sure. So we know that someone
Speaker 1: gained access to Sony's systems, they stole an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of information. They proved that they stole it by posting
Speaker 1: some of that online, and they wiped the infected computers
Speaker 1: after extricating the data. So let's talk about some of
Speaker 1: the actual data leaks now. The movies were probably the
Speaker 1: highest profile example of a data leak to a lot
Speaker 1: of people, right because people are really familiar with movies,
Speaker 1: so something like that happening, it's easy to take notice.
Speaker 1: There were also some screenplays of films that had not
Speaker 1: yet gotten into production that got released. Those I would
Speaker 1: argue were probably one step lower than the finished films were.
Speaker 1: And then for folks in the film industry or for
Speaker 1: people who are really interested in the business side of filmmaking,
Speaker 1: what really stood out were the internal documents revealing things
Speaker 1: like people's salaries and personal emails between Sony employees and
Speaker 1: other folks, emails that frequently contained embarrassing or downright damaging information.
Speaker 1: On December one, two thousand, fourteen files that detailed Sony
Speaker 1: salaries hit the internet. The top seventeen Sony executives had
Speaker 1: their salary information pre bonus that is leaked online. Other
Speaker 1: files had more than six thousand Sony employees, current and former,
Speaker 1: and their salary information, including other stuff like personal information
Speaker 1: that was personally identifiable information. Several media outlets published this information.
Speaker 1: At least the information about the executive salaries, and that
Speaker 1: showed a pretty large disparity in the company. Like it
Speaker 1: was no real surprise, because I mean, it's kind of
Speaker 1: an open secret, but it was no real surprise that
Speaker 1: the white men in the executive area of Sony, we're
Speaker 1: making substantially more money than people of any other designation
Speaker 1: than white male. Right, Like that was top tier was
Speaker 1: white male. This, by the way, would lead some people
Speaker 1: like Richard Stingle to criticize the media, and the criticism
Speaker 1: mostly centers on the fact that there was a dangerous
Speaker 1: story here about hacking and cybersecurity that was in need
Speaker 1: of addressing. Like the focus in Stingles might need to
Speaker 1: be on the hackers and what they had done and
Speaker 1: the extent of their crime and the serious nature of
Speaker 1: that crime, but the media was focusing on illegally obtained
Speaker 1: information that made Sony look bad. Now to that, I say,
Speaker 1: I understand where you're coming from, and absolutely it would
Speaker 1: be good to spend more time to focus on the
Speaker 1: ramafic cations of cybersecurity. That is a conversation that is
Speaker 1: not held often enough and never with enough sincerity or gravity.
Speaker 1: But we also know that you know what kind of
Speaker 1: content drives clicks, Right, if you write about cybersecurity, you're
Speaker 1: going to get a fraction of the number of clicks
Speaker 1: that you're going to get if you wrote about how
Speaker 1: certain male executives were making way more money than their
Speaker 1: female counterparts, for example. And ultimately, media is a business,
Speaker 1: so you kind of see where that's going to go. Right,
Speaker 1: It's no surprise that media companies are going to really
Speaker 1: focus on the stuff that drives traffic, because ultimately that's
Speaker 1: what drives revenue. Sony leadership went into damage control, with
Speaker 1: Sony chiefs Amy Pascal and Michael Linton sending out a
Speaker 1: memo urging patients and understanding among Sony employees, saying, you know,
Speaker 1: calm down, chill out, it will be okay, and the
Speaker 1: two states that the hackers had taken a large amount
Speaker 1: of information and that it was pretty safe to assume
Speaker 1: that any information about the employees themselves could have been
Speaker 1: a part of all that, and that if Sony had
Speaker 1: information about you as an employee, there was a really
Speaker 1: good chance that the hackers had that info at this point.
Speaker 1: So I think this was a clear effort to get
Speaker 1: ahead of problems like people finding out how much they
Speaker 1: were paid compared to their peers, which could definitely promote
Speaker 1: some uncomfortable discussions if they were to turn out that
Speaker 1: salaries weren't equitable across the board. Also to kind of
Speaker 1: alert employees like, hey, you might have to pay very
Speaker 1: special attention to things like your credit report now because
Speaker 1: your personal information, including stuff like social Security numbers, is
Speaker 1: now in the hands of hackers who are making it
Speaker 1: freely available. So even if the hackers don't do anything
Speaker 1: with your data, they're making it freely available for other
Speaker 1: cyber criminals to make use of that data. By December third,
Speaker 1: another dump caught headlines, and this data dump included stuff
Speaker 1: like scans of visas and passports of people who are
Speaker 1: working on various Sony films, so even more personal information.
Speaker 1: This also included some notable celebrities like Angelina Jolie. There
Speaker 1: were also documents that include the user names and passwords
Speaker 1: for the accounts of several Sony executives. But one thing
Speaker 1: that got wide circulation was a collection of Sony employees
Speaker 1: takes on the works of a Mr. Adam Sandler. Turns
Speaker 1: out a lot of Sony employees have a low opinion
Speaker 1: of Adam Sandler's art and it was stories like these
Speaker 1: that received far more media coverage than the actual attacks,
Speaker 1: because again, juicy, right, watching Hollywood eat its own is
Speaker 1: something that the media thought was very entertaining and would
Speaker 1: drive a lot of engagement. Then again, you could argue
Speaker 1: that there wasn't a whole lot you would say about
Speaker 1: the attacks other than you know they had happened. While
Speaker 1: some people had been circulating the theory that it was
Speaker 1: North Korea behind it all, even in the early stages,
Speaker 1: there were there were no smoking guns that you could
Speaker 1: point to. Rather, there was a suspicion because of the timing,
Speaker 1: along with the upcoming release of the film the Interview,
Speaker 1: and the reaction of North Korea's media to the idea
Speaker 1: of the film the interviews, So while people were mentioning
Speaker 1: North Korea, there wasn't any definitive evidence yet to kind
Speaker 1: of lean on. In fact, on December three, Sony issued
Speaker 1: a statement that said a report that North Korea was
Speaker 1: behind the attack was not accurate. On December five, someone
Speaker 1: claiming to be the Guardians of Peace sent a threatening
Speaker 1: message to Sony employees, and on the eighth, someone claiming
Speaker 1: to be that same group posted a message on a
Speaker 1: file sharing site that said sony was to quote stop
Speaker 1: immediately showing the movie of terrorism, which can break regional
Speaker 1: peace and cause the war end quote. But this message
Speaker 1: says that the previous one on the fifth was written
Speaker 1: by someone else, someone who was not affiliated with the group,
Speaker 1: and the plot thickens. In the meantime, North Korea media
Speaker 1: states that the North Korean government played no part in
Speaker 1: the attack, but does call out the attack as a
Speaker 1: quote righteous deed end quote. So, in other words, their
Speaker 1: statement is, hey, we didn't do it, but whoever did
Speaker 1: is aces in our book. On December nine, the hackers
Speaker 1: dumped a huge number of Amy Pascal's email correspondence online.
Speaker 1: This dump included some stuff that was particularly embarrassing for
Speaker 1: the studio, such as an exchange between Pascal and producer
Speaker 1: Scott Rudin, who called Angelina Jolie quote a minimally talented,
Speaker 1: spoiled brat end quote. The following day, more emails between
Speaker 1: Pascal and Rudin emerged, showing the two joking about what
Speaker 1: President Obama's films might be. And those were jokes that
Speaker 1: were at best racially insensitive, which is a gentle way
Speaker 1: of putting it. I have some other thoughts but I'll
Speaker 1: reserve them. I should add that Ruden earned a reputation
Speaker 1: as a real piece of work. In fact, just earlier
Speaker 1: this year, in one he was essentially forced to resign
Speaker 1: from Broadway League after numerous people were stepping forward to
Speaker 1: you know, accuse him of engaging in abusive, violent behavior.
Speaker 1: Hecked Wall Street Journal said he would brag about burning
Speaker 1: through one nineteen personal assistants in five years. Anyway, this
Speaker 1: is the kind of juicy stuff that media companies go
Speaker 1: gaga for, and clearly I am no exception to that.
Speaker 1: By December twelve, people discovered that the hackers had posted
Speaker 1: documents that included Sony employee medical records. Some of the
Speaker 1: details include not just the Sony employees, but their families.
Speaker 1: The media, for once did not go bunkers and start
Speaker 1: publishing those documents, which I guess is a small favor.
Speaker 1: Right On December, screenwriter and director Aaron Sorkin had an
Speaker 1: editorial piece published in The New York Times calling out
Speaker 1: the media for playing a part in helping the hackers.
Speaker 1: Sorkin's point was that the hackers committed the crime, but
Speaker 1: the media was disseminating the information to the public. On
Speaker 1: a scale that would not have been possible by the
Speaker 1: hackers alone. That, in fact, the way the hackers were
Speaker 1: posting information was really challenging to sieve through. Your average
Speaker 1: person isn't just gonna troll through a paste bend site
Speaker 1: to read through mountains of text files to look for
Speaker 1: something juicy. The media companies had folks like on staff
Speaker 1: or probably a lot of unpaid or barely paid interns,
Speaker 1: who were doing precisely that thing all day, and so
Speaker 1: Sorkin argued, the hackers saw their goals real lies, not
Speaker 1: through their own efforts, but because the media was taking
Speaker 1: care of all that, bringing more harm to Sony and
Speaker 1: the people who worked there, which is at least partly true.
Speaker 1: I think, honestly, I don't think we really have any
Speaker 1: good guys in this story. Because we've got Sony, which
Speaker 1: was clearly the victim of an attack, but it was
Speaker 1: also a company that had a lot of skeletons in
Speaker 1: a lot of closets. Then you have the general media
Speaker 1: sensationalizing every revelation, and then you had the actual hackers
Speaker 1: who were responsible for the attack itself. It was kind
Speaker 1: of like a Tarantino movie. Everybody is at least to
Speaker 1: some degree a bad guy. On December sixte we got
Speaker 1: a major development in the saga. The hackers presumably the
Speaker 1: hackers anyway, posted a threat stating that movie theaters that
Speaker 1: chose to screen The Interview would be targeted for attacks,
Speaker 1: likening the effort to the terrorist attacks. On September eleven,
Speaker 1: two thousand one, the Department of Homeland Security issued a
Speaker 1: statement saying that it had no credible evidence that any
Speaker 1: such attack was actually being planned or prepared, and so
Speaker 1: there wasn't any evidence to show that this was something
Speaker 1: that was really going to happen. But Rogan and Franco
Speaker 1: canceled their promotional tour for The Interview, and movie theaters,
Speaker 1: including Big Chains, began to issue statements that they would
Speaker 1: not carry the film. Sony Pictures, seeing this quick response
Speaker 1: from theaters, makes the decision to postpone the release of
Speaker 1: The Interview, essentially canceling its debut on Christmas Day. Now
Speaker 1: I should add this was really after movie theaters had
Speaker 1: already said they were not going to show the movie,
Speaker 1: But once Sony made this announcement, there was a huge
Speaker 1: backlash against the company, with people calling the studio to
Speaker 1: reverse its decision. But we gotta take a quick detour here, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: in the old days of the movie business, movie studios
Speaker 1: pretty much owned a piece of every part of the
Speaker 1: movie making process. Us. I'm talking about everything from you know,
Speaker 1: the production studios that were shooting movies, to the companies
Speaker 1: that were actually producing Cellu Lloyd film to shoot on
Speaker 1: to chains of theaters to where you would show the film.
Speaker 1: But the US government broke all that up because it
Speaker 1: was considered to be anti competitive and a monopoly. And
Speaker 1: so then movie theater companies were divorced from movie studios
Speaker 1: and they had more of a say of what films
Speaker 1: they would and would not show in their respective houses.
Speaker 1: So Sony could reverse its decision, in fact, it ultimately did,
Speaker 1: but it couldn't force theaters to play the interview because
Speaker 1: Sony didn't own the theaters, and a lot of theaters
Speaker 1: just didn't want to take then the risk without you know,
Speaker 1: you know, and didn't become the company that potentially put
Speaker 1: audiences in mortal peril or were associated with that desire.
Speaker 1: A few theaters still had plans to show the interview,
Speaker 1: but then, you know, Sony makes this decision, So then
Speaker 1: those theaters announced that they would instead screen a print
Speaker 1: of the film Team America World Police, which was made
Speaker 1: in two thousand four and which features Kim jong Il,
Speaker 1: Kim Jong UN's father as the antagonist of the movie.
Speaker 1: And if you're not familiar with Team America World Police,
Speaker 1: that was made by the creators of South Park, so
Speaker 1: you probably get the gist of it. Anyway. Paramount Pictures
Speaker 1: released a statement that said it was not going to
Speaker 1: offer the film for redistribution, so it canceled those backup
Speaker 1: plans as well. A couple of days later, President Obama
Speaker 1: said that Sony really made a mistake canceling the release
Speaker 1: of the film, And at this point, the general belief
Speaker 1: was that the hack was directed by North Korea and
Speaker 1: that capitulating to the demands was sending a bad international message,
Speaker 1: and Sony was kind of in a tight spot on
Speaker 1: this one. Following that, there was an escalation and rhetoric
Speaker 1: between the United States government and North Korea, with the
Speaker 1: US calling on North Korea to compensate Sony for the
Speaker 1: losses that had suffered as a result of the attack.
Speaker 1: North Korea continue you to deny involvement, but it did
Speaker 1: extend an offer to help investigate the attack and both
Speaker 1: countries leveled some veiled and not so veiled threats against
Speaker 1: each other. On December, Sony announced it was in fact
Speaker 1: going to release the interview on Christmas Day, both in
Speaker 1: any theater that wanted to show it, as well as
Speaker 1: video on demand. Sony got praise from the President for
Speaker 1: this decision. And then the movie comes out and no
Speaker 1: theaters are attacked, and for some media outlets, this was
Speaker 1: the end of the story. But we actually have a
Speaker 1: lot more to cover. But first we're gonna take another break.
Speaker 1: So the Guardians of Peace, who the heck were slash?
Speaker 1: Are they? There were six messages signed as though they
Speaker 1: came from this group. One is generally thought to be
Speaker 1: from someone else, a journalist who sent a hoax message,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, then, of course you have the
Speaker 1: instance of the one message from the Gardens of Piece
Speaker 1: that says a previous message was not written by them.
Speaker 1: So maybe we just have four official messages. But who
Speaker 1: sent them? Who was behind the attack? Different people have
Speaker 1: different answers to that question, and they are contradictory answers. See,
Speaker 1: there are a few different theories as to who was
Speaker 1: behind the whole thing. Attribution is very hard with cybersecurity,
Speaker 1: it is much easier to get a handle on what
Speaker 1: damage was done than it is to definitively say this
Speaker 1: is who was behind it. One story that tends to
Speaker 1: be pitched is that the attacks were not particularly sophisticated,
Speaker 1: largely because you know, Sony had such terrible security that
Speaker 1: it actually didn't require a state backed military hacker group
Speaker 1: to gain access, that it could have potentially been carried
Speaker 1: out by amateurs. And since one of the big theories
Speaker 1: was that it was a North Korea sponsored hacker group
Speaker 1: that was to blame, this would cast some doubt on
Speaker 1: that particular story. After all, anyone could infiltrate this system,
Speaker 1: then there's no reason to suspect it was a really
Speaker 1: well equipped, well funded, and highly trained group of hackers
Speaker 1: that were to blame. But you get into some other elements,
Speaker 1: each of which makes the actual difficulty of pulling off
Speaker 1: the whole thing a little more steep if you assume
Speaker 1: the attackers were not from North Korea. For one thing,
Speaker 1: a lot of the stuff posted from the raid included
Speaker 1: code that appeared to have been compiled on a machine
Speaker 1: running in the Korean language. Now, as many people have
Speaker 1: pointed out, that could just be a strategy to throw
Speaker 1: investigators off the scent. You could have said it to
Speaker 1: you know, the internal language of the computer to Korean
Speaker 1: as a smoke screen, and it could just be a
Speaker 1: red herring in order to shift the blame to North Korea.
Speaker 1: Then there was the issue that some of the i
Speaker 1: P addresses so seated with posting stuff about the raid
Speaker 1: appeared to be originating from North Korea. And again you
Speaker 1: can fake that. You can use tools to hide your
Speaker 1: true i P address and substitute another one, and this
Speaker 1: is not really that hard to do, but it's also
Speaker 1: not exactly the sort of thing a really amateurish group
Speaker 1: of hackers wouldn't necessarily think about. So my point is
Speaker 1: that if we use critical thinking, we see that the
Speaker 1: argument of anyone could have done this doesn't necessarily hold water,
Speaker 1: simply because it would require a bit more thought and
Speaker 1: effort put into it then a lot of folks would
Speaker 1: typically manage. Now that's not to say that the North
Speaker 1: Korea hypothesis is iron clad, but rather that dismissing it
Speaker 1: out of hand is something we cannot do either. It's
Speaker 1: certainly a huge challenge to make off with that much data.
Speaker 1: If you're talking about actual terabytes of information? How do
Speaker 1: you get that off of Sony's serves and into your
Speaker 1: own grubby little hands without anyone noticing? Now, as I'm
Speaker 1: sure you're aware, data transfer speeds hit a limit. Depending
Speaker 1: upon the nature of your connection, you could have a
Speaker 1: data throughput that would mean transferring a terrabyte could take
Speaker 1: several hours or more than a day, depending on those speeds.
Speaker 1: Higher bandwidth connections can do this a lot faster, but
Speaker 1: you're still talking about a ton of data from a
Speaker 1: lot of different Sony systems. This takes time. On top
Speaker 1: of that. On the I T side over at Sony,
Speaker 1: these kinds of transfers could potentially raise some red flags
Speaker 1: if anyone is paying attention and I T admin could
Speaker 1: see that amount of data transferring out of the company,
Speaker 1: and they might have some questions, or they might at
Speaker 1: least look into it to see what the heck Sony
Speaker 1: is transferring and and to whom and why is that
Speaker 1: much information going to a single place or or a
Speaker 1: small group of IP addresses. Of course, it's possible that
Speaker 1: no one even noticed, but another possibility. One the hypotheses
Speaker 1: that some people put forward is that the hack was
Speaker 1: at least in part an inside job. The story goes
Speaker 1: that there was some Sony employee or maybe a former employee,
Speaker 1: who had beef with the company. Maybe it was over salaries,
Speaker 1: maybe it was over work conditions, maybe it was a
Speaker 1: general culture issue or whatever. But this person then had
Speaker 1: a plan to help some hackers get access to a
Speaker 1: huge amount of data that could damage the company that
Speaker 1: the employee hated oh so much. This narrative helps explain
Speaker 1: how the hackers might have gained access to data without
Speaker 1: anyone noticing, with someone perhaps literally transferring files onto drives
Speaker 1: inside Sony and then just smuggling those drives out rather
Speaker 1: than establishing some sort of external network connection with another computer.
Speaker 1: Then at some point the hackers introduced the tools to
Speaker 1: wipe those systems, which might have been done remotely or premises.
Speaker 1: But that theory is a little iffy. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's certainly possible. I don't know if I would go
Speaker 1: so far as to say plausible. There were definitely Sony
Speaker 1: employees who had beef with Sony. Sony was going through
Speaker 1: layoffs in two thousand and fourteen, and morale at Sony
Speaker 1: was pretty low. But it's it's challenging to see how
Speaker 1: this kind of approach would also have hackers say, oh,
Speaker 1: let's throw the sent off and cast the blame on
Speaker 1: North Korea. Um Also, one of the arguments that supports
Speaker 1: this is that the evidence that was dropped had a
Speaker 1: particular harm towards Sony and was targeted specifically at Sony,
Speaker 1: and that only people in the know in Hollywood would
Speaker 1: know to drop that specific information. That I think is
Speaker 1: a spurious argument because the information that was dropped was
Speaker 1: in huge, huge chunks of data, and yes, there was
Speaker 1: incredibly damaging stuff thrown in there, but it wasn't necessarily targeted, right.
Speaker 1: It was more like the shotgun approach. Lots of little pellets,
Speaker 1: some of which are hitting the target, but it I
Speaker 1: don't know necessarily that the hackers had a deep appreciation
Speaker 1: for which bits of information have potentially the biggest punch.
Speaker 1: I think it was just that shotgun approach. Then there's
Speaker 1: the theory that the hacks orchestrator wanted to hurt Sony
Speaker 1: for financial gain, and this story says that the person
Speaker 1: responsible maybe they wanted to short sell Sony stock. So
Speaker 1: that's when you borrow stock in a in a specific
Speaker 1: company from some other investor, you sell that stock at
Speaker 1: whatever the current market value is, and then you wait.
Speaker 1: Now you have to return the stocks you borrowed at
Speaker 1: some specific deadline, but what you're hoping is that the
Speaker 1: stock price will drop, So then you buy back the
Speaker 1: shares you borrowed, but you do so at a lower
Speaker 1: price and you get to keep the difference. Anyway, that
Speaker 1: was another hypothesis as being thrown around, But the really
Speaker 1: big one, the main one, the one that the FBI pushed,
Speaker 1: was that North Korea directed a government funded hacker group
Speaker 1: to conduct these attacks, and some of the evidence seemed
Speaker 1: to point that way, such as the fact that, as
Speaker 1: I said, the code was definitely compiled on machines that
Speaker 1: were switched to the Korean language, and that some of
Speaker 1: these IP addresses associated with the attack appeared to be
Speaker 1: from Korea. While some security experts questioned the reliability of
Speaker 1: the evidence cited by the FBI, the National Security Agency
Speaker 1: or an essay, said it had more ironclad evidence that
Speaker 1: supported the link to North Korea, but it was not
Speaker 1: able to publicize what evidence was due to concerns about
Speaker 1: national security, which then critics said was oh, isn't that convenient.
Speaker 1: In two thousand eighteen, the U s Department of Justice
Speaker 1: charged a man named Park Jin Yolk, who was believed
Speaker 1: to be in North Korea, as being a responsible party
Speaker 1: in several hacking attacks, among them the attack on Sony.
Speaker 1: He was also charged with stealing more than eighty million
Speaker 1: dollars from a bank in Bangladesh and being partly responsible
Speaker 1: for the development and deployment of a famous piece of
Speaker 1: ransomware called Wanna Cry. US officials said that a multi
Speaker 1: year investigation led to the discovery that Park was one
Speaker 1: of the hackers responsible for these attacks, and that he
Speaker 1: belonged to a North Korean backed hacker organization called the
Speaker 1: Lazarus Group. The officials said that Park had headed up
Speaker 1: a company in China that posed as a legit tech company,
Speaker 1: but it was in fact affront for this hacker group.
Speaker 1: And from a code perspective, there seemed to be links
Speaker 1: to the Lazarus Group, which was known to repurpose bits
Speaker 1: of code in updated malware design, so they just would
Speaker 1: reuse certain bits of code, and that was one way
Speaker 1: that security researchers could say this either came from the
Speaker 1: Lazarus Group or it came from someone who was taking
Speaker 1: malware that was developed by the Lazarus Group and repurposing it,
Speaker 1: and that this this code dates back to two thousand
Speaker 1: nine in some cases, which suggests that the Lazarus Group
Speaker 1: is kind of a long time actor in the hacking world.
Speaker 1: North Korea, I should point out, denies that Park even exists,
Speaker 1: But earlier this year, US federal prosecutors announced charges against
Speaker 1: Park and two other North Korean citizens, Jong Chung Yolk
Speaker 1: and Kim Ill with criminal conspiracy, conspiracy to commit wire fraud,
Speaker 1: and bank fraud. And again, this is about more than
Speaker 1: just sony pictures. These charges include claims that the three
Speaker 1: set up fraudulent blockchain operations and defrauded targets of millions
Speaker 1: of dollars. There is zero chance that these men will
Speaker 1: ever have to face charges in the United States for
Speaker 1: their crimes, because the United States and North Korea do
Speaker 1: not have the sort of diplomatic relationship to extradite people
Speaker 1: from one country to the other to stand trial for crimes.
Speaker 1: That is just not where North Korea and the United
Speaker 1: States are diplomatically, not by a long shot. So these
Speaker 1: charges are you know, they're formal charges, but they're also
Speaker 1: kind of paper threats because there's there's not any chance
Speaker 1: that these three will stand trial for those crimes, and
Speaker 1: so we're left with just the charges, and that is
Speaker 1: very weak evidence for a lot of people, right like
Speaker 1: it could just be they could argue it's a convenience
Speaker 1: and that we don't really have the full or real
Speaker 1: story about who was behind the Sony hack. So it's
Speaker 1: one of those things that feeds into things like conspiracy theories,
Speaker 1: because when you have a lack of information, people will
Speaker 1: fill that gap in with speculation, and often they become
Speaker 1: more and more certain that that speculation is fact. As
Speaker 1: for me, I do not know who committed the Sony hack.
Speaker 1: I honestly don't know. I'm inclined to think it was
Speaker 1: North Korea. But at the same time, I must honest
Speaker 1: and how clumsy the whole handling of it was it
Speaker 1: it is also it's it's simultaneously easy and hard to
Speaker 1: believe that it was North Korea. Um, but only because
Speaker 1: of the lack of sophistication and how the aftermaths of
Speaker 1: the attack was carried out. So I do not know,
Speaker 1: and I'm not gonna put my money down on any
Speaker 1: particular party at this point. I hope one day we
Speaker 1: have a definitive answer and UH, and that we can
Speaker 1: see exactly how this was carried out, why it was
Speaker 1: carried out and UH, and more importantly, figure out how
Speaker 1: to prevent future attacks, largely by practicing better security hygiene.
Speaker 1: But that's it for this episode. Hope you enjoyed this.
Speaker 1: If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in
Speaker 1: future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me.
Speaker 1: The handle on Twitter is text stuff h s W
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again release it. Text Stuff
Speaker 1: is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
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