More from the Sony Pictures hack (opens in new tab)

China, Russia, Iran--now North Korea is the "cyber boogeyman"? Attribution is an incredibly difficult problem. Color me skeptical. Does anyone know where the rumors of North Korean direction started?

Any explanation below seems more likely to me than it really was a North Korean operation (yes, pure rank speculation):

1) it was made up by Sony to make them look somehow less incompetent†,

2) it was made up by some media organization to drive clicks, or

3) the initial investigation revealed suspicious activity from IPs in/linked to North Korea--which could, among other explanations, just mean the attacker owned their boxes and launched attacks from there

† ...And boy does their image need improvement! The attackers were supposedly able to exfiltrate a rumored 100TB of extremely-sensitive corporate data before anyone noticed?! After the rootkit fiasco, the epic SOE break-in, and now this--I can't imagine anyone wants their data anywhere near Sony's networks (nor, perhaps, Sony's software anywhere near their networks).

I couldn't tell from the OP and the previous story it linked to: is the spreadsheet of salaries and personal data straight from Sony's servers? Or is it a cracked database file that the hackers took time to convert to XLS for easier dissemination? I'm guessing the former, since the screenshots show the kind of spreadsheets that are lovingly hand-formatted and curated by the people tasked to maintain them.

It's kind of a fascinating look at how data is clumsily handled within corporations. I mean, how do they keep everything synced between the sheets that contain salaries/benefits, severance actions, etc.? (shudder)

After what Sony did to Geohot, I must say that I have zero sympathy for them (as an organization) here. Obviously, the leak of personal data (SSNs, etc.) is a different story.

So the average salary was $119K? I'd love to know what the median is, the average is probably highly skewed by a few big numbers at the top.

This article isn't great. The data is from Sony. I guess if fusion is a news site they need to 'confirm'. But it's impossible for the data to be anything else. I've never seen one faked spread sheet, let alone millions.

The leaked data so far is in a 35 gig multipart rar. The list of files only(No directories or metadata) is 400meg -> 1 gig uncompressed. Both are on PB.

The NK angle seems to be there was Korean comments in the malware. But there's also a theory it was insiders angry about the restructure.

The hackers were using the Sony PlayStation network to seed these latest torrents. IE they still had some control days later.

This sort of thing is pretty hard to stop. Security kills productivity, you won't be rewarded for lowing output with no proof you didn't anything useful, that's the nature of the issue.

Limits on stolen data in the old days was more about getting it out, not security. With the huge pipes in and out these days this will become more common. The only thing stopping people doing this everywhere currently is they can't be bothered.

[edit] This is also a good lesson on why you should never put anything in writing you don't want everyone to know.

Weak article. I'd like to see a link to a thorough analysis of the leaked data.

out of sheer curiosity, does anyone have the pastebin link for this? I know it was taken down, but I'm hoping the Barbara Streisand Effect has taken place.

I wish the private keys used by the ps4 are part of the leak. Would seem only right after Sony's behavior when it came to Geohot.

I'm surprised that Sony didn't increase their defenses when North Korea first warned them months ago as they were promoting the new movie "The Interview". Given that North Korea can be a credible threat, it would have made a lot of sense to beef up security or at minimum increase monitoring.