Sony Pictures Entertainment fighting back

PanARMENIAN.Net - Sony Pictures Entertainment is fighting back, Re/code says.

The studio behind the “Spider-Man” franchise and “The Social Network” has taken technological counter-measures to disrupt downloads of its most sensitive information, which were exposed when a hacking attack crippled its systems in late November.

The company is using hundreds of computers in Asia to execute what’s known as a denial of service attack on sites where its pilfered data is available, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Sony is using Amazon Web Services, the Internet retailer’s cloud computing unit, which operates data centers in Tokyo and Singapore, to carry out the counterattack, one of the sources said. The tactic was once commonly employed by media companies to combat Internet movie and music piracy, Re/code says.

In one of the most devastating cyber security breaches in recent memory, a hacking group calling itself Guardians of Peace claimed to have stolen under 100 terabytes of Sony Pictures’ financial information, budgets, payroll data internal emails and feature films and has slowly leaked portions of it to public file-sharing sites such as PasteBin.

The breach has caused havoc within Hollywood’s inner circles as private correspondence between powerful producers and executives have exposed internal politics and petty gripes. More importantly, the data also appeared to include spreadsheets outlining financial deals Sony had with third parties, which could hurt its standing with its partners. These details also expose how much these third parties have paid Sony for rights to certain TV shows and films.

These files have not been verified by Sony Pictures, which also declined to comment for this story.

With the fifth such illicit data dump, made available earlier this week, individuals who attempted to access the torrent file encountered bogus “seeds” — or computers — that sapped the resources of their software, the sources said.

This variant on the hacker’s favorite tool, the denial of service attack, slowed download speeds to a crawl. The latest document leak, offered Wednesday, Dec 10, had a different type of file name which apparently fooled Sony’s interdiction efforts.

North Korea, or its sympathizers, are being investigated as suspects in the attack, and while the reclusive state denied any involvement, it praised the perpetrators for their “righteous deed.”

Sony’s technique is similar to one it employed in the early days of file-sharing, when it worked with an anti-piracy firm called MediaDefender, Re/code says. The firm populated file-sharing networks with decoy files labeled with the names of such popular movie as “Spider-Man,” to entice users to spend hours downloading an empty file.

The goal was to frustrate users and prod them to turn to legitimate movie sites. It was a temporary fix that worked until file-sharing sites grew more sophisticated and provided information that allowed users to easily identify these so-called spoof files.