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Sony Employees Receive Email Threat From Hackers: 'Your Family Will Be In Danger
MojoKid writes: Things are going from bad to worse when it comes to the recent Sony Pictures Entertainment breach. Not only has sensitive financial information been released — including the salaries of high-ranking Sony executives — but more damaging personal information including 47,000 Social Security numbers of employees and actors have been leaked to the internet. We're now learning some even more disturbing details, unfortunately. Guardians of Peace (GOP), the hackers claiming responsibility for infiltrating Sony's computer network, are now threatening to harm the families of Sony employees. GOP reportedly sent Sony employees an email, which just so happened to be riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, that read in part, "your family will be in danger."
Guardians of Peace (GOP) [...] are now threatening to harm the families of Sony employees.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
I realize that Sony has done some extremely dickish things, And they should have learned, as a company, about the importance of security after the PSN debacle. But even so, this is asinine behavior on the part of whoever is making these threats.
Wanting to see Sony burn is a perfectly legitimate goal, but threatening the safety of average employees and their families is several steps over the line.
Wasn't the idea that Sony would release some Movie about the leadership or whatever in North Korea?
And these "Peace" guardians likely want to preserve the leadership of NK.
So now we get to see how powerful the FBI and Japanese equivalent are at actually tracking down cyber criminals.
Yes, because corporate-funded (cyber-)terrorism against a soveriegn nation has *no* potential down sides, right? ( :
~Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
The issue is that the SSN is used for identification. In Belgium we also have a national number. Pretty easy. in Dutch yet this only links to you and does not identify you as such.
Everybody above 12 needs to have an ID. Checking vadility is free and the chip on it is opensource
Oh and if you are a financial company, you can do verification at the national bank where you can check if you are allowed to give people a credit or not and add that you gave people a credit.
With just the number, you can do nothing. You would at least have the (valid) ID card as well.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Are those emails legit or fake? Well what better way to reverse this from a super embarrassment for Sony and corporate world to "them hackers are gonna kill us" and make the hackers look even worse and dangerous. Next we'll see the words Anti Corporate Terrorists used.
>GOP reportedly sent Sony employees an email, which just so happened to be riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, that read in part, "your family will be in danger."
Yah, those bad grammar homicidal hackers.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
If I had modpoints, id mod you up seriously on that one. japanese workers dont have the choice of "following orders". its that or their job/face/life/family. unless you understand japanese culture to some extent, it is likely that this will just go over your head. screwing up as a worker, is intolerable. as a manager, it is your fault if a subordinant screws up, and you take the rap for it, so you make bloody sure that the subordinant s dont screw up, by any means, and if it still happens, you loose face, and that can very well kill your career and any future prospects. no wonder the suicide rate is so high in japan. the last thing the ordinary workers need, is this kind of shit...
Anyone can send an email. I'm not sure how they know for certain gop sent the email and not some random 13 year old with bad english skills.
It would certainly be a great way to discredit gop too. Just have someone send an over the line email claiming to be gop. The fbi, a private contractor, etc.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Yes, because corporate-funded (cyber-)terrorism against a soveriegn nation has *no* potential down sides, right? ( :
Being a "sovereign nation" doesn't make you more powerful. Only power makes you powerful: manpower, materials, and moral strength. North Korea (if they're the aggressors here) has no meaningful way to project military power, and in a purely "cyber" war, a corporation with a larger budget than N Korea has an advantage. OTOH, Sony hasn't had it's shit together since the founder left, and likely can't act effectively in its own defense.
N Korea could be completely shut down here by simply isolating them from the internet, which really isn't that hard unless China decides to defend them.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm wondering this as well... there's reference to requests or demands, but absolutely no indication of what they are.
I cannot for the life of me imagine what on earth an apparent terrorist organization would want from an entertainment company.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Was there a demand? The abstract doesn't say.
Seriously, you don't know what this is about?
Sony made a movie called "The interview" who's plot is that Seth Rogan gets the chance to interview Kim Jung un (Dictator of North Korea) and the CIA enlists them to kill him.
North Korea took offence to that and demanded that Sony stop making the movie.
Sony refused.
The hacker group is suspect of being part of the North Korean military.
GoP are good. They have to be. The level of pwnage achieved is simply far beyond anything script kiddies could pull of. Not just the scale of the breach in total data, but in variety. Email, employee records, media from production - data from several divisions, and they even leaked it out through computers that host Playstation infrastructure, a completly different part of the organisation. Whoever GoP are, they have a very high level of skill.
This group then sends some idiotic threats, badly written at that, to low-level employees? I believe I detect the faint smell of fish. It just seems out of character.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Sony were responsible for sending this email as a false-flag operation. This would achieve two things they must be much desiring of right now. First, it casts GoP in a bad light - makes sure they are seen by the rest of the world as violent thugs and criminals, rather than being venerated as grassroots hackers who defeated a loathed mega-corporation. Secondly, a threat of physical harm brings a lot more attention from law enforcement - the FBI will devote more resources to aiding in the investigation, as will the corresponding law enforcement agencies in other countries.
Another clue is the grammatical style used. I have to think that any official DPRK hacking group would have close ties to the government, and any press releases or emails would be written by someone with the official news/media services there.
Not necessarily. This isn't an official communique from the N. Korean government. Remember, they denied involvement. My gut feeling is that it was written by the head of cyber warfare unit.
I do think they're capable of it. Their cyber warfare unit has plenty of experience hacking S. Korean targets. They are not noob at all. They employ thousands and the competition to join is fierce. Cyber warfare unit members get top-notch treatment such as getting enough food to eat and your own apartment, which are rare luxuries there. Even though we tend to think of N.Korea as a dirt-poor stone age nation, they have their own nukes and missiles. They managed to put a satellite in orbit. They send their best and brightest to Russia and China for training.
About the threats to Sony: seems to me like it was written by a Korean with a poor book learning of English. Also seems like a dictionary translation. I've seen English written by such people, and this has the same flavor.
"It's your false if you think this crisis will be over after some time." - this definitely sounds like something a Korean would write while looking up words in a Korean-English dictionary. He's probably thinking of "shil-soo" which means a mistake, but if you look it up in a 1960's paperbound dictionary, "false" is one of the entries! "Some time" is also commonly used by dictionary Koreans because there's a specific noun in Korean that means "Short interval of time", but English has no such noun. A fluent English speaker would use an adjective or an adverb to express himself, but a dictionary Korean would look for an equivalent noun and use whatever he found in the dictionary.
Thus "It's your mistake if you think this crisis will be over shortly" becomes "It's your false if you think this crisis will be over after some time."
Are those emails legit or fake? Well what better way to reverse this from a super embarrassment for Sony and corporate world to "them hackers are gonna kill us" and make the hackers look even worse and dangerous. Next we'll see the words Anti Corporate Terrorists used.
Those are false flag emails, designed to elicit outrage in the real attackers so they might identify themselves.
Remember, almost everything we hear about the hackers comes via Sony, filtered through the media. It's all theater at this point. Pretty good stuff too. Enjoy.
They're not script kiddies, not even close.
So some people *say*, but I haven't seen any information that points to exotic skills. I'm not saying Destover itself doesn't contain some sophisticated techniques, but what it *does* is crude, drama queen stuff.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What effect would that really have? http://www.northkoreatech.org/...
It would screw up the rulers, and possibly the military. However, seeing as most of the aircraft they "fly" are still using vacuum tubes, they're fairly well EMP hardened. It's probably safe to say that a lot of their military equipment is EMP hardened by virtue of using obsolete* technologies.
* I'm sure somebody will say that vacuum tubes aren't obsolete.
Sony hired FireEye (where In-Q-Tel is a major investor) which since Dec 2013 owns Mandiant. The latter and it's operations features prominently in the HBGary emails from a couple of years ago. I wouldn't put it past any of them to carry out a false flag operation, at the expense of the Sony employees (compare to the "hit me, hit me hard" to lamely cover up letting a prisoner escape) to try and draw out the GOP.
GOP is also doing nobody a favour, if they did, by releasing a couple of pre-release movies. That makes Sony the legitimate victim. Releasing documents, on the other hand, that show dirty backstabbing, expose lies, and otherwise shed some light at the secretive goings-on of a major Copyright MAFIAA member makes Sony the perp.
Don't forget, the keyword of the 2010s is Victimship. The art of making yourself look like the victim. It's not really new, as burglars that were caught in the act and became good acquintances with the homeowner's baseball bat always did this.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.