The work day ended early for Sony Pictures employees. Most of them, anyway. The IT crew will be logging overtime as they deal with a massive breach perpetrated by a group of hackers calling themselves #GOP. The letters stand for Guardians of Peace, though probably not this Guardians of Peace. While their motives are unclear at this point, what is clear is that this was an attack of cinematic proportions.
Reportedly the original attack breached a single server; from there, it spread like wildfire across Sony’s network. The image above popped up on “every computer all over Sony Pictures nationwide,” according to a Reddit poster with inside connections. Other sources have confirmed the ominous image, which looks like something straight out of a 90s hacking flick.
Employees were forced to shut down their computers and work ground to a halt. Eventually, many of them were sent home. This didn’t just impact Sony’s Culver City, California offices
either. Sony Pictures operations around the globe were taken offline, but not before the hackers made off with huge haul of internal documents.
#GOP has already leaked a large ZIP file containing two massive lists detailing the extent of the doxxing. Most of what’s inside appears to be from the Sony Pictures finance department, including the stuff of IT guy nightmares: Excel sheets and ZIP files that appear to be full of passwords. There’s even a text file that helpfully lists the last 10 recently used passwords for something at Sony.
The existence of those facepalm-worthy files doesn’t necessarily come as a shock, but you’d like to think that they learned a lessonfrom the 2011 PSN hack — the fourth biggest data breach in history at the time.
More on this story as it develops.
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