Who is attacking sony

NewsHour Shop. About Feedback Funders Support Jobs. Close Menu. Email Address Subscribe. What do you think? Leave a respectful comment. Close Comment Window. Yes Not now. Leave a comment. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter. The pair apologized. Pascal left her job months later. The collective reaction by everyone at the State Department was a yawn. I was dumbfounded. I called my friend Jeff Shell, the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and, more importantly, the head of Universal Pictures.

Almost no one in Hollywood was. Even the Motion Picture Association of America kept mum. The press was completely suckered and abdicated its real responsibility. As the Guardians of Peace had released the hacked emails of Sony executives, a scrum of journalists gleefully reported on the embarrassing, and sometimes salacious, emails of Sony execs, big-time producers, and actual movie stars.

Pascal had emailed Rudin asking for advice before going to an Obama fundraiser hosed by Jeffrey Katzenberg. Both Pascal and Rudin were Democratic and Obama donors, and the stories focused on their contemptible interchange about Obama and a range of African American—centric films.

Now that I was in government, I saw things from the other side: Why was the press publishing what was in effect stolen property—that is, emails hacked and leaked by a hostile foreign power? Why was that acceptable behavior?

You could still report on the hack, but without using the poisoned fruit of the hack. What exactly was the public interest in Scott Rudin speculating that President Obama likes Kevin Hart movies compared to a foreign power assaulting free expression in America?

I also had a personal interest. Michael Lynton, the chairman of Sony, was a good friend of mine, and, while I was in office, I had asked him to help me with what had become the focus of my job: countering ISIS messaging and countering Russian disinformation and propaganda. Sony, it turned out, was one of the largest sellers of content for the Russian periphery.

A few days into the attack, I had reached out to Michael to see if there was anything I could do at State to help him. He was frustrated.

There was one profile in courage during this whole story, one person in Hollywood and Washington who stood up for freedom of speech and expression, though he was not a senator, or the head of a studio, or the publisher of a newspaper: George Clooney. Clooney had immediately recognized the threat of the hack against Hollywood and the media business, and had drawn up a letter that he and his agent, Bryan Lourd, sent to all the heads of all the studios and big Hollywood production companies, asking them to support Sony.

Clooney was appealing to values all of the studios stood for: freedom of expression and personal liberty. No one signed. This was a dumb comedy that was about to come out. This is a silly comedy, but the truth is, what it now says about us is a whole lot. We have a responsibility to stand up against this. What was the important story to be covering here? I understand that someone looks at a story with famous people in it and you want to put it out.

The problem is that what happened was, while all of that was going on, there was a huge news story that no one was really tracking. And if it is, are we really going to bow to that?

Sony then had basically little choice but to cancel the Christmas release of the movie. Even the video-on-demand distributors had turned Sony down. Sony then suspended all of its promotion, advertising, screening, and digital ads on Facebook and Twitter. On the day that Sony basically scrapped the movie, I got this email from Jeff Shell:.

It was only then, after the theaters refused to show the film and Sony paused the release, that the White House seemed to get engaged—and not in a terribly helpful way. He did it anyway. We do not own movie theaters. We cannot determine whether or not a movie will be played in movie theaters. Almost everybody refused—Netflix, Facebook, Apple, Comcast—all of whom were concerned about getting hacked. Only Google and Stripe were willing to help to get the movie out.

But there was another shoe to drop, and it affected me and what I was trying to do at State: the leaking of emails between myself and Lynton. Thanks to this investigation Kaspersky Lab was able to proactively spot new malware produced by the same threat actor. The attackers were actively re-using their developments: they borrowed fragments of a code from one malicious program and implemented it into another.

Besides, droppers — the special files used to install different variations of a malicious payload — all kept data within a protected ZIP archive. The password was one and the same in many different campaigns. In fact, it was hardcoded into the dropper. Even the methods that criminals used to wipe traces of their presence from an infected system were similar which helped to identify the group.

The investigation revealed that Lazarus Group was involved in military espionage campaigns and it sabotaged operations of financial institutions, media stations, and manufacturing companies. Wild Positron was a topic of discussion at the Security Analyst Summit Kaspersky Lab shared the investigation results with AlienVault Labs. Eventually researchers from the two companies decided to unite their efforts and conduct a joint investigation.

It turned out that the activity of the Lazarus Group was also being researched by many other companies and security specialists. The first malware samples produced by the Lazarus Group date back to