Monday when workers of Sony Entertainment has met as ominous skeleton image on their PC's, from a group called #GOP (Guardians of Peace), causing many employees to have no access to the network.
The message contains a threat to release "top secret" data if undisclosed demands were not met. Plus, a number of Sony-related Twitter accounts also appear to have been broken.
According to Geek.com, cited in PCmag, #GOP leaked a large ZIP file with two 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," Geek said. "There's even a text file that helpfully lists the last 10 recently used passwords for something at Sony."
The threat:
"Warning: We've already warned you, and this is just a beginning," the message said. "We continue till our request be met. We've obtained all your internal data including your secrets and top [secrets]."
As reported by PCmag, Sony Pictures told Deadline that the company is "investigating an IT matter." According to an unidentified source at Sony Pictures, Variety said the situation may take up to three weeks to resolve. And In the meantime, employees have been instructed to turn off their computers and disable Wi-Fi on mobile devices
This is not just the first time Sony dealt with hackers, previously on August the company's Playstation Network was taken offline by Lizard Squad, following a second attack onto Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley via Twitter.
While on the previous month, Sony was hit by a hacker named Reckz0r who tried to upset Sony by falsely hacking Sony PS4, which was posted in pastebin. This time the image created by #GOP appeared publicly first on Reddit, which was posted by anonymous user claiming to be an ex-Sony employee, whose friend shared a screenshot of the threat,
Wee Teck Loo, head of consumer electronics research at Euromonitor said any negative news for Sony just "piles" pressure on the company that has been struggling financially in both its TV and mobile business.
"Charles Lim, senior industry analyst at ICT, Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific, however, said the attack has put into question what "multi-layers of prevention" Sony has to detect and handle such risks.
