Business has come to a halt at Sony Pictures' Culver City headquarters in Los Angeles County on Monday. The company-wide network has been hacked in what looks to be an extortion operation.
Sony Pictures, the American arm responsible for distributing Sony's film and TV productions, has immediately shut down Internet access for all employees after a hacker infiltrated the company's system and took over all company computers to display a picture of a glowering red skull with the words "Hacked by #GOP." The image also includes a message that the hackers will release "secret" and "top-secret" information by Sony Pictures if their demands are not met by 6 P.M. Eastern Time on Monday.
"Warning: We've already warned you, and this is just a beginning," the message says. "We continue till our request be met. We've obtained all your internal data showing your secrets and top secrets. If you don't obey us, we'll release data shown below to the world. Determine what will you do till November the 24th, 11:00 (GMT)."
The image shows links that lead to .ZIP files that supposedly contains the file names of Sony Pictures documents which holds sensitive financial data as well as the private keys that allow the company's network administrators to access the company's servers. It is unclear what these demands are or whether Sony Pictures understand what the hackers want from the company.
The hackers have also apparently gotten hold of a multitude of Twitter credentials and have posted similar threats on a number of film-related accounts. Some of these Sony has regained control over, but not before B2C was able to capture a screenshot of the threats. The Twitter account for the 2007 dance drama "Stomp the Yard," for example, also shows a post that says "Hacked by #GOP."
"You, the criminals including Michael Lynton will surely go to hell. Nobody can help you," the hackers said, referring to the CEO of Sony Pictures and Sony Entertainment.
For now, the company will not comment on the issue except that it is looking into it as an "IT matter," according to an email sent by Sony Pictures spokesperson Jean Guerin to Deadline.com. A source contacted by Variety says it could take anywhere from a day to as far out as three weeks to resolve the situation. Another person who spoke with Bloomberg says GOP is associated with a group called Guardians of Peace. The source, however, declined to elaborate.
The attack comes just a day after a Twitter account called DerpTrolling announced that it infiltrated Sony's PlayStation Network and pilfered off the millions of email addresses and passwords owned by gamers. Sony, however, denies an attack has been launched on the PSN. One analyst believes DerpTrolling's announcement was meant to divert the company's sights away from where the real attack was going on.
"It is quite possible that yesterday was a deliberate diversion while the hackers worked on breaking into Sony corporate," says Internet security expert Hemanshu Nigam. "Hackers often use tactics used during warfare. All studios should be on red alert and monitor their system logs extremely carefully for any anomalies."
In 2011, Sony became the target of another widespread attack as hackers broke into the PSN and stole off with millions of gamer credentials. Earlier this year, a group of hackers claimed responsibility for a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the same gaming network, crashing the website and closing off access to gamers around the world for a day.
