14 DAY TRIAL // Over the weekend, Guardians of Peace (GoP), the hacker group that stole an impressive amount of data from the networks of Sony Pictures Entertainment, announced that they were preparing to release a larger cache on Christmas.
The announcement made on Pastebin was accompanied by another dump of files, 5GB in size, and it proposed a survey for the readers, to find out what they would like to be leaked.
A gift for Christmas is promised
A set of five disposable YOPMail (Your Own Protection Mail) email addresses are provided in the snippet, for everyone to make their request through a message with the subject “Merry Christmas” as an identifier.
“We are preparing for you a Christmas gift. The gift will be larger quantities of data. And it will be more interesting,” the announcement from GoP read, predicting that this cache would put Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) into an even worse state than it is now.
Since the final stage of the attack on SPE’s network on November 24, GoP has started to release large quantities of files containing highly confidential information.
They have shared with the general public not just details about the infrastructure of the company, passwords and company documents, but also internal email exchanges of Sony co-chairwoman Amy Pascal.
In the latest batch they leaked the script for the next James Bond movie, titled “Spectre,” and conversation on the subject.
It is said that, at the beginning, the hackers managed to share the Sony information with the world through the high-speed connection of five-star hotel St. Regis in Bangkok, Thailand.
What could be worse than what has already transpired?
This is only speculation though, as this news does not come through official channels. In fact, none of the details published by the media with regard to the attack or the hackers has received official confirmation.
In an email exchange with a FireEye representative, the parent company of incident response firm Mandiant that was hired for investigations, we’ve been told that the security experts have not issued any statement and have been quiet since they got the job.
The Pastebin message from Guardians of Peace does not hint at the type of information the group plans to leak, and considering the data that has already been sifted through, it is difficult to imagine something that could be more damaging to Sony.
However, Sony is also taking measures to protect their content and their reputation as a company, and it has written a letter to several media publications to ask them to stop disseminating information found in the files leaked by the hackers.
Media reported that the company also resorted to posting fake entries with the leaks on sharing websites, in order to hide the real links and thus reduce access to the information stolen and released by GoP.
