I have an acquaintance who is a former Sony Pictures employee. According to him they’re replacing every computer at Sony Pictures and rebuilding their IT infrastructure from scratch. The hacking was so thorough that even people who connected to the corporate network with personal laptops have discovered keyloggers on their machines.
You don’t look at too many corporate Exchange servers, do you? 
People write all sorts of stuff in emails that should be left at home, or better yet, not written down anywhere.
When I set up the email at my office, the first thing I told everyone as to get a hotmail account (or something similar). I didn’t want their goat porn on our server. Plus I had directed undeliverable mail to go to webmaster (me).
Why assume that? Al Qaeda can commit violent acts on American soil. So can the Mafia. North Korea has more assets than either of those organizations has.
North Korea’s mad about a movie that jokes about killing Kim Jong-un. Maybe they’ve told Sony that if the movie is released they’ll start killing executives at Sony. Taking down Sony’s computer system was just a demonstration that they’re serious.
It wasn’t just email servers. It was the entire IT infrastructure of Sony.
The FBI has formally blamed NK.
From Risk Based Security, the best aggregate coverage I’ve seen on the Net: daily analysis since the first announcement and breakdown of the top-level directory structure of each release.
How many terabytes still to be released…
Wow.
Hollywood accounting isn’t so much as to avoid paying taxes, as it is to avoid paying actors a percent of the profits, if that’s in their contract. The IRS has rules for how to do the accounting for them, and they usually get paid. It’s the sucker who didn’t read his contract that says how the profits are calculated that he gets his X% of that is screwed over.
By showing their hand over an essentially trivial cause, North Korea has attracted a good deal of FBI attention to their capabilities when they might have kept their powder dry for a much more vital attack.
It’s not about legality or even taxes but not paying actors. If an actor gets 5% of the net profit, the production company cooks the books so there is no profit. Similar to what the record companies do to ensure musicians don’t get any share of profits.
One way to retaliate might be to seize North Korea’s merchant fleet when they are at sea.
They know that we’re not going to attack them and we know that they’re not going to attack us, in any meaningful way. North Korea has existed in its current state since 1953, threatening to take over the world any day now. After 61 years, I think we can safely say that everyone’s in favor of the status quo.
Outside of petulant nonsense, North Korea doesn’t have anything to use its military capabilities on. Giving away the game doesn’t detract from any grander scheme, since there isn’t a grander scheme.
Hollywood is famous for many accounting tricks - paying “management fees”, advertising fees, rental for the editing facility, etc. to the studio so the film as a venture makes less money. IIRC one film, they built a studio facility in Michigan with government assistance for one film; the studio ends up owning the buildings and getting future tax breaks, that first film paid more than half of the capital cost construction out of its budget, and made less money. Another favourite was back when the TV networks paid big bucks for first showing of a movie on TV, they would bundle a blockbuster with a half-dozen duds that lost money, sell it as a package, and spread the revenue evenly over the lot. TV was paying mainly for one blockbuster, but the recorded revenue was a fraction of that. And so on…
Its taking longer than they thought 
I dont see why anyone would be digging out old machines. Worst case, repartition, reformat, reload, done. Software attacks do not break hardware.
Large company computer systems have layers of physical and software redundancy. offline backups of mission critical data, idled virtual machine instances that can be brought online in an hour or two, mirrored data centers, . Heck one of the restaurants i service has a 4 server cluster… something like sonys corp hq would have layers upon layers of protection. if they didnt, sony should be having executions in the courtyard as a warning to IT people everywhere to protect their backups like their life depends on them.
Yeah, and the North Korean government is usually noted for being so rational and all.
Yeah, that seems suspicious. How would that information be stored anyway? None of the standard employee-tracking systems have tables or fields for tracking extramarital affairs or HIV infection.
SELECT DISTINCT EmpFirstName + ’ ’ + EmpLastName AS UnfaithfulEmployeeSpouse FROM Employee emp
INNER JOIN EmployeeExtramaritalAffairs ema
ON emp.EmpId = ema.EmpId
Do any companies even track extramarital affairs in an informal sense? Perhaps in that big HR “file” they have on you? Where would they get this information from? Private investigators?
I assumed they were talking about people foolishly using their corporate email account to discuss things like extramarital affairs or HIV status, rather than any official corporate tracking of such things.
Likewise. I doubt HR keeps a who’s naughty database.
But emails with that info could be very damaging mostly to the employee themselves, and to the company if it’s a hive of inappropriate behavior.
Still it stuns me that people would but that kind of stuff on company exchange servers.
Just a reminder about the damage to Sony: the juicy personal revelations is bupkis compared to the utter exposure of every single contract and negotiation position with talent, marketing, distribution, etc., and every contractor from cameras and helicopter to food truck.
*Every single thing *on every computer in Sony Pictures, since the last four to six years–again, see the updates–as well as a lot from contractors who just signed in temporarily, is, or may be, public.
How can any business survive that?
That “or somethin’” would most likely be the case and, again most likely, simply be scripts for movies that have yet to be shown. Kind of hard to have suspense built up when everyone already knows what’s in the script.