There’s quite a mystery developing relating to last week’s Sony Pictures network hack, which allegedly saw personal details of 7,000 Sony Pictures’ employees leaked online.
Sony Pictures’ network infrastructure was brought to its knees last week after being hacked by a team claiming to be a group called Guardians of Peace (GOP). Employee computers were compromised with a message displayed on screen from its hackers claiming to have obtained sensitive internal data. There’s also the suggestion that the group were attempting to bribe Sony Pictures in some way: “We continue till our request is met,” reads one of the sentences displayed on the screens of desktop PCs within the company.
The hack has caused the leak of sensitive data such as internal passwords, scans of Hollywood passport photos and employee data such as social security numbers, salaries and addresses. Several complete movies have also been leaked. What’s strange is that investigations prior to the security breach have apparently uncovered that the PlayStation Network servers were used to distribute 27.78GB of sensitive data from Sony Pictures which was spread across file-sharing networks such as Pastebin.
The Register writes:
“Until early on Tuesday afternoon, San Francisco time, more than 60 systems seeding the archive on the BitTorrent network appeared to be virtual servers in the Amazon EC2 cloud, according to security researcher Dan Tentler.
A number of those fingered server instances – eg, 54.77.62.39 – are also serving websites for Sony Computer Entertainment. The EC2 instances serving up the data were checked by another researcher, who found some had SSL certificates signed by Sony.”
The Register states that the PlayStation and Sony servers should be separate and speculate that the seeded data could mean that hackers have taken control of Sony’s Amazon Cloud account, or even that the large archive of data has been deliberately been pushed out by Sony to catch hackers.
Speaking with Forbes, Tentler states that the hacking group may have some control over the PlayStation Network infrastructure and gave his opinion on why he feels PlayStation Network’s servers have been used to distribute data.
“A random guess? Sony is in the habit of releasing video games that are parallel to movies – like the Transformers franchise, for example. Perhaps the [Amazon] EC2 instances are actually shared in small part between the PlayStation Network and Sony Pictures for the promotion of the games, or transferring of image/creative assets…,” he said.
Rumours have been flying around as to the reasons behind this latest hacking on Sony Pictures with one suggestion being that North Korea may be involved in response to a new film called ‘The Interview,’ which features the country’s leader. North Korea has described the film as an “act of terrorism” but has since denied any part in the security breach.
Sony is no stranger to hacking attempts, with the PlayStation Network infamously taken offline for 23 days in 2011 after 77 million user accounts were compromised and data stolen. Later that year, Sony Online Entertainment was also hacked resulting in the theft of 24.6 million user accounts containing credit card numbers and personal details.
With PlayStation servers implicated in this new attack on Sony, it’s certainly a concern that hackers could breach PlayStation Network security once more. The FBI are currently investigating the hacking.
In what appears to be an unrelated attack on Sony, users of the PlayStation Network on PS4, PS4 and PS Vita could not access the service last night after what appeared to be a DDoS attack on its servers. Hacking group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility.