The grinch came in the shape of “lizards” and “guardians of peace” this year as multiple hacking groups toyed with Sony over the holidays.
Many believe that the first attack against Sony was a plot to punish them for their creation of the movie “The Interview.” In the movie, Seth Rogen and James Franco play news reporters who are sent to North Korea as part of an assassination attempt against the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-Un. The movie was set to be released on Christmas Day, but the release date was altered after multiple cyber attacks against Sony.
“I was a bit shocked to see that the movie was about an assassination attempt on a current world leader….Not exactly the smartest thing to do against a country that we don’t exactly have the smoothest relations with,” senior Rosanna Chen stated when asked how she felt about the drama surrounding the movie.
The initial attack happened on Nov. 24 after a group going by the name “Guardians of Peace” (GOP) hacked the Sony software and broadcasted a picture of a red skeleton onto employees’ computers with the message, “If you don’t obey us, we’ll release data shown below to the world.”
On Nov. 27, five Sony films including, “Annie,” “Fury,” “Mr. Turner,” and “Still Alice” were dumped online by the GOP for people to illegally download.
Throughout the next week, the GOP continued to release classified information, including salaries of current Sony employees and critical comments made by Sony executives about actors who have worked in Sony films, like Adam Sandler and Angelina Jolie.
Eventually, the GOP took it a step further and began sending Sony threatening messages after hearing that the company would proceed to show the movie in theaters.
“Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made. The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11 of September 2001” the GOP stated on Dec. 16.
At this point, Sony became fearful for the viewers’ safety after the GOP also threatened to bomb theaters that would show the film. Because of this occurrence, Sony canceled the original Christmas release date and Rogen and Franco also canceled promotional appearances for the movie.
Hearing of the bomb threats and North Korea’s supposed involvement, the U.S. government began to get involved. According to Deadline.com, the FBI publicly confirmed that North Korea was in fact behind the attack on Dec. 19, and President Barack Obama spoke out against the pulling of the movie from theaters.
“We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States,” Obama stated during a press conference.
A couple days later, North Korea offered to investigate the Sony hacking with the U.S. and threatened that there would be consequences if America did not participate in the investigation or continued to blame North Korea for the attack.
On Dec. 23, Sony announced that it would keep its original release date and release the film to theaters and online. As promised, on Christmas Day, the company made the movie available for download on Google Play, Microsoft Xbox Video, and YouTube Movies. According to Sony, “The Interview” made $15 million in online rentals over the holiday weekend in which it was released.
“I know North Korea is bad and all, but geez, it was so incredibly offensive. So much so that it just started to seem like American propaganda,” stated junior Katherine Liu. “I feel like if a foreign country made a movie like that where the U.S.’s president was targeted and mocked, the U.S. would see that as an act of war.”
Yet, even after the movie was released, Sony’s hacking troubles continued to persist.
On Christmas Day, another hacker group that call themselves the LizardSquad took credit for a denial of service hack that took place on Sony’s PlayStation and affected other gaming systems, like Xbox.
The hack prevented kids, who were geared up to finally play their new gaming systems, from logging onto the system network.
Later on Christmas Day, the LizardSquad tweeted out, “Jingles bells, jingles bells, xbox got ran, oh my fun it is to troll you morons…hey!”
LizardSquad is also responsible for past attacks on Sony. In August, they took credit for a nationwide outage of the PlayStation Network and tweeted out bomb threats to a flight that Sony Executive John Smedley was aboard.
Eventually Sony got their PlayStation systems back online and two members of the LizardSquad group were arrested.
Blogger Brian Krebs reported that Vinnie Omari, a 22-year-old from Britain, was part of LizardSquad. Right now Omari is out on bail until his hearing in March. Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation also picked up another member of Lizard Squad later in the week, a 17-year-old known as Ryan.
Ryan acted as a spokesperson for the group during the Christmas Day attacks and is currently being held in jail.
