
#Combat arms hacks may 2016 free#
What exactly was the public interest in Scott Rudin speculating that President Obama likes Kevin Hart movies compared to a foreign power assaulting free expression in America? By publishing the emails, the press was making itself complicit not only in North Korea’s crime, but in its goal of censoring Sony. Now that I was in government, I saw things from the other side: Why was the press publishing what was in effect stolen property-that is, emails hacked and leaked by a hostile foreign power? Why was that acceptable behavior? Shouldn’t you consider the origin of the information before deciding to use it? If you don’t, aren’t you incentivizing other attacks? You could still report on the hack, but without using the poisoned fruit of the hack. I bet he likes Kevin Hart.īoth Pascal and Rudin were Democratic and Obama donors, and the stories focused on their contemptible interchange about Obama and a range of African American–centric films.

#Combat arms hacks may 2016 movie#
Ten days after the initial hack, the “Guardians of Peace” released a message saying that Sony had “refused to accept” its terms and must “stop immediately showing the movie of terrorism.” A week later, they released another message saying that anyone who went to The Interview would suffer a “bitter fate.” government banned the film, “it be fully responsible for encouraging and sponsoring terrorism.” (That same day, Rogen tweeted: “People don’t usually wanna kill me for one of my movies until after they’ve paid 12 bucks for it.”) In June, a government spokesperson warned that the movie was “the most blatant act of terrorism and war” and threatened “a merciless countermeasure.” A couple of months earlier, North Korea had sent a letter to the secretary-general of the U.N., saying that unless the U.S.

For months, North Korea had complained about the pending film. The movie starred Seth Rogen and James Franco as a pair of bumbling journalists who go to North Korea to interview Kim Jong Un and eventually assassinate him. Their motivation seemed to be a dark comedy called The Interview. intelligence agencies were pointing the finger at North Korea. The story of the Sony hack is worth reexamining as a model of modern information war, how we got it so wrong, and what we might do to prevent it from happening again. Once again we have a candidate for president encouraging a foreign power to help him in his election campaign. Well, we were certainly unready when it happened in 2014. The vulnerability of major American institutions, the late and inept response of government, the press’s obsession with gossip that blinded them to a national-security threat, and a trampling of the First Amendment. Eventually all of the hacked emails were published by WikiLeaks.ĭoes that sound familiar? Two years later, in 2016, after we learned of Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and their dark bargain with WikiLeaks to release that stolen information, it’s clear that the Sony hack foreshadowed not only the Russian attack on our election, but provided a panoramic vista of the modern, global information war. Over the next month, they released nine batches of confidential files onto the public internet: everything from executives’ salaries to embarrassing emails about “no-talent” movie stars, to unfinished film scripts to actual unreleased films like Annie and Fury. The hackers had actually been inside Sony’s system for weeks, and stolen all of Sony’s data before deleting it. The studio shop would only accept cash.Īnd it got worse. Within hours, the global media giant was back in the 1980s, its employees using fax machines and pens and paper. It junked 3,262 of Sony’s 6,797 personal computers and 837 of its 1,555 servers.

Before the entire system went dark, the malware wiped out half of Sony’s global digital network. If you don’t obey us, we’ll release data.” It read like the opening of a bad script for a cyber-thriller.īut for Sony, the horror movie was just the beginning.

We’ve obtained all your Internal data Including your secrets and top secrets. Below was a message that read, in not very good English, “We’ve already warned you, and this is just a beginning. Sony employees who logged on to their desktops early on Monday morning, November 24, 2014, were greeted with the sound of digital gunfire and the image of an ominous red skeleton under the title “Hacked By #GOP,” which stood not for the Grand Old Party, but for a shadowy organization called Guardians of Peace.
