There is something big that was not pointed out in this article. Whoever did it got paid to do it. This is not a simple case of revenge of a nerd, nor is it a case of "your political movie is offensive."
Someone hates Sony / SPE, and paid for the attack.
How did I come to this conclusion?
1. No matter how mad you are, being angry is not enough fuel to collect 100tb of data and then leak it out in 25gb chunks. You need motivation to continue, and money is that motivation.
2. While company security is terrible everywhere, and with enough work anyone can be hacked, it takes a measure of skill and careful planning to pull off a hack like this. This is a not a "we got lucky" hack. It was planned carefully.
3. The amount of data, and the selection of which data gets released when, as well as the difficulty overall of the operation, says to me that multiple people were involved in the hack.
A reason why it isn't North Korea:
If it was ( either intentionally or accidentally ) it is in NK best interest to either claim responsibility and embrace it, or to prove they didn't do it. They have done neither. This implies that they can't prove they did or didn't do it, because nobody under NK government control was involved.
Someone hates Sony / SPE, and paid for the attack.
How did I come to this conclusion?
1. No matter how mad you are, being angry is not enough fuel to collect 100tb of data and then leak it out in 25gb chunks. You need motivation to continue, and money is that motivation.
2. While company security is terrible everywhere, and with enough work anyone can be hacked, it takes a measure of skill and careful planning to pull off a hack like this. This is a not a "we got lucky" hack. It was planned carefully.
3. The amount of data, and the selection of which data gets released when, as well as the difficulty overall of the operation, says to me that multiple people were involved in the hack.
A reason why it isn't North Korea: If it was ( either intentionally or accidentally ) it is in NK best interest to either claim responsibility and embrace it, or to prove they didn't do it. They have done neither. This implies that they can't prove they did or didn't do it, because nobody under NK government control was involved.