Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. is a renowned name in the entertainment industry. It’s the American entertainment subsidiary of the Japanese multinational corporation Sony. The computer security of the entertainment giant was recently breached and the attack exposed five feature films, produced by this company, releasing them on sites that are meant for sharing files. The films released on the sites are unreleased films like “Mr. Turner”, “Still Alice”, “To Write Love on Her Arms”, the remake of “Annie” and the already released Brad Pitt Starrer “Fury”.
The studio co-chiefs of Sony Pictures, Michael Lynton and Amy Pascal, approved that “…a large amount of confidential Sony Pictures Entertainment data has been stolen by the cyber attackers, including personnel information and business documents.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating the cyber attack on Sony Pictures. They have released an alert to all the business houses in the U.S. about the malware that was used by cyber criminals as the best possible weapon used in this crime. According to the FBI, the malware that has been used as a weapon in the cyber attack is capable of overriding data present in the hard drives of the infected computers.
The cyber attackers have identified themselves as “Guardians of Peace” and the FBI are taking into consideration that North Korea could be behind this attack, along with alliance from others. The creators of the malware have used Korean language to code the software used in the crime. Though Sony has not publicly confirmed the people who could be behind this attack, they are nonetheless suspicious about North Korea having a hand in this. And this is due to the open threat that the country has issued against Sony for its upcoming film “The Interview”. This film is about two TV journalist starred by Seth Rogen and James Franco, who are recruited by CIA to assassinate the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.
As reported by the tech website Re/code, North Korea has termed the film as “an act of war” and its distribution “absolutely intolerable”. Because of this cyber attack, Sony shut down its internal computer network last week to prevent further damage due to the malware.
