Sony Pictures Hack: Guardians of Peace, The Interview and Lazarus Group

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On Monday, November 24, 2014, employees at Sony Pictures Entertainment found their computers frozen by a warning from a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace. Investigators later found the attackers had been inside for at least two months, and some claimed a year. The hackers said they took more than 100 terabytes, then used a variant of the Shamoon wiper to overwrite master boot records. A November 21 email to executives from a group called God'sApostles, demanding money, went unnoticed. The leaks that followed exposed 47,000 Social Security numbers, medical information and salaries, the script for Spectre, copies of Annie, Mr. Turner and Still Alice, and talks with Marvel over Spider-Man and with Nintendo over a Mario film.

On December 16 the hackers named The Interview, the Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg comedy about a plot to kill Kim Jong-un, invoked September 11 and threatened theaters. AMC, Regal and Cinemark declined to show it and Sony canceled the release; President Obama called that a mistake, and CEO Michael Lynton said the theaters had pulled out. The FBI and NSA attributed the attack to North Korea, citing malware overlap with attacks on South Korean banks and media and IP addresses hardcoded into the malware, and the U.S. imposed sanctions. Sony then released the film in about 300 independent theaters on Christmas Day and online. Skeptics including Norse and Hector Monsegur pointed to employees laid off in May 2014; the FBI rejected that, Novetta tied the attack to the Lazarus Group, and in 2018 the Justice Department charged North Korean citizen Park Jin Hyok.

• Emails between co-chair Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin, including jokes about President Obama's film tastes, led Pascal to step down in May 2015.
• Aaron Sorkin wrote that journalists publishing the stolen emails were doing the hackers' work for them.
• North Korea denied involvement, praised the hack as a righteous deed and offered a joint probe, which the U.S. refused.
• Sony spent $15 million on immediate damages in the first quarter of 2015.
• WikiLeaks later published a searchable archive of the stolen documents over Sony's objections.