North Korea Hacks Sony Pictures Over Movie Release
Image and public relations are everything to North Korea. For them, it is propaganda that serves whatever odd reasons they have. So, when Sony Pictures started to advertise the movie, "The Interview", starring James Franco and Seth Rogen, as two reporters who go to North Korea to assassinate Kim Jong Un, the country's young leader (who loves western movies and attended college in Switzerland), Kim, himself, took notice and was pissed.
You see, the movie is just comedy and satire, but to Kim, it is very offensive in the portrayal of North Korea and himself. Countries have the same problem as people do when viewing comedy, opinions different. In July, the government sent the US government a terse and threatening statement saying the release of this movie is "undisguised terrorism and war action". It went on to say that NK will retaliate with merciless countermeasure if released to the world. They were serious. NK is not a funny place.
In 2013, hackers from NK totally disrupted South Korea communications and the source code indicated so. Then, the operation was known as "Dark Seoul", computer systems and banks suddenly went offline causing mayhem. In late November, the infrastructure and servers at Sony Pictures was hacked into using the same code, which has been traced back to NK. Sony suffered a major failure and several unreleased movies ready for release were made available and pirated on the Internet. When employees turned on their computers, a message appeared: Hacked by GOP. GOP stands for Guardians of Peace. The computers were useless after security had been breached. The movie, Annie and Fury, were two of the films leaked onto the Internet. Other films are: Mr. Turner, Still Alice, To Write Love on Her Arms.
While this may be the only NK response to the film about them, ironically, The Interview movie was not damaged or leaked out, currently to be released before Christmas 2014. The FBI has been called into the hack. Some 6000 employees' social security numbers and personnel data was also stolen, such as, income, addresses, contact etc.
