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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.
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.
So now we get to see how powerful the FBI and Japanese equivalent are at actually tracking down cyber criminals.
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*
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.
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.
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.
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.