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Sony Pictures hackers stole 47,000 social security numbers, including Sly Stallone's

The attack on the company, perpetrated by a group calling itself #GOP, is thought to have come from North Korea. The country's leaders had previously threatened "merciless retaliation" if the United States didn't ban showings of The Interview, the Sony Pictures movie that sees Seth Rogen and James Franco try to assassinate North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un.

Among the affected are Hollywood celebrities such as Sylvester Stallone, Rebel Wilson, and Anchorman director Judd Apatow. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Social Security numbers can be found alongside salary information, home addresses, and contracts for Sony Pictures employees and freelancers. Some of the affected individuals reportedly stopped working for Sony Pictures as far back as 2000.

A week after it was brought to a standstill by a hacker group that may or may not have hailed from North Korea, things are getting even worse for Sony Pictures. The hackers that crippled the company's computer systems have now released a vast hoard of Sony Pictures' private documents onto the internet. An analysis of more than 33,000 documents showed that they displayed passwords to internal computers, credit cards, and social media accounts, as well as the Social Security numbers of 47,000 current and former Sony Pictures workers.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/4/7337407/sony-pictures-hackers-stole-47000-social-security-numbers-including-stallone

Five movie screeners from Sony Pictures have made their way onto torrent sites after the studio’s computer system was hacked earlier this week.

These include unreleased titles “Annie,” “Mr. Turner,” “Still Alice,” and “To Write Love On Her Arms,” as well as World War II drama “Fury.” The latter has been in theaters for over six weeks, but is now the second most popular pirated film with more than 1.2 million downloads as of 11AM on Sunday, notes Variety.

The leak is most likely related to the hacking last week of one of Sony Pictures’ servers, which caused all computers used by the studio to go down. An image with the words “Hacked by #GOP” (which stands for Guardians of Peace, not the Republican Party) appeared on employees’ computer screens, along with a demand for access to financial documents.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/30/five-sony-pictures-movie-screeners-leaked-after-hacking/


One knock against the North Korea theory is that The Interview itself wasn't leaked, but North Korea probably wouldn't want that film to be freely (albeit illegally) mass distributed in the first place. Variety also discovered that text from a message sent by #GOP is "encoded in a format compatible with Chinese and Korean characters." Sony Pictures Entertainment told Variety that while no clear link exists presently between the hack and North Korea, the investigation is still underway.
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/sony-pictures-under-siege-as-hackers-leak-upcoming-films-20141201