A massive cache of internal Sony Pictures Entertainment e-mails and documents was posted online and made searchable Thursday by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
The material includes the company’s lobbying efforts and the budgeting of $1 million for Edward Snowden’s Russian lawyer as part of the costs for an Oliver Stone movie about the former National Security Agency contractor.
The Obama administration has said North Korea was behind the November attack, which exposed personally identifiable information about Sony Pictures employees, sensitive internal financial data and embarrassing private e-mails between then-studio chief Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin.
At the time of the breach, the studio was preparing for the release of “The Interview,” a film starring Seth Rogen and James Franco that featured the violent death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. North Korea has denied responsibility for the attack on Sony Pictures.
In an online news release Thursday, WikiLeaks said it was posting a searchable database of 30,287 documents and 173,132 e-mails from Sony Pictures in part because “the original archives, which were not searchable, were removed before the public and journalists were able to do more than scratch the surface.”
The WikiLeaks news release said the cache reveals “ties to the White House (there are almost 100 US government email addresses in the archive), an ability to impact laws and policies, and connections to the US military-industrial complex.”
The news release quotes Julian Assange, Wikileaks editor in chief, as saying, “This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation.”
Assange took refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2012. He has agreed to be questioned in London by authorities about allegations of sexual assaults in Sweden.
“It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geo-political conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there,” Assange said in the news release, referring to the Sony material.
Sony condemned the release. “The cyber-attack on Sony Pictures was a malicious criminal act, and we strongly condemn the indexing of stolen employee and other private and privileged information on WikiLeaks,” a spokesman for Sony Pictures said in a statement.
“The attackers used the dissemination of stolen information to try to harm SPE and its employees, and now WikiLeaks regrettably is assisting them in that effort.”
Not included in the WikiLeaks news release is any description of how WikiLeaks obtained access to the e-mails and documents or any indication of what proportion of the stolen Sony Pictures information is represented by the WikiLeaks archive.
The release of the
documents might provide clues to help identify the point of entry the hackers used to penetrate Sony Pictures’ networks.
The FBI has said the likely technique used was “spearphishing,” in which a hacker tries to get an unsuspecting target to click on an infected e-mail link or attachment, thus opening access to the computer and then the network to which it is attached.
Among the e-mails posted by WikiLeaks is a series showing that Pascal was spearphished 42 days before Sony’s system was wrecked by malware.
