The Sony Hack – Whodonit?

For those closely tracking the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack this past month, any regret over not having read a detective novel lately was likely laid to rest.

If you harboured any doubts about the maxim that truth is stranger than fiction, this one did everything possible to help you kick that thought out the window. And for all those who raise a finger/ smirk/ roll their eyes every time Rajnikanth does something totally improbable, this conundrum of an incident is so mind-boggling that Rajni’s antics appear lame in comparison.
 
On the one hand, we have an isolated dictatorship being blamed for an incident by the FBI, while on the other, did the incident really happen? Or was it the most elaborate PR stunt ever by a company that has a penchant for being hacked. The kind of personal details that were leaked leads one to think that this may not be a PR stunt, but, what if even that was orchestrated? No one knows for certain if this is a stupendous PR success or a monumental failure. Confusing? Welcome to the world where the boundaries between Data leakage, Espionage, Cyberwar and Hollywood movies and becoming bleaker by the second.
 
If you clear away the cobwebs of details surrounding this incident, there are but a few facts of which we can be certain. Sony Pictures Entertainment declared a few days before the official release date of a Hollywood movie – a comedy at that – that they would not be releasing it because they were hacked and were threatened with dire consequences if the movie was released. The president of the United States stepped in and said that Sony should not have succumbed to the pressure tactics. Sony does a volte-face and releases the movie over the internet as a video on demand service on YouTube and a few other websites (including Sony’s website — provide your credit card information to a company that was absolutely, completely hacked?). Over 300 independent theatres in the US also released the movie. There were no attacks on the theatres, thankfully. North Korea’s internet was more down than up for a week around Christmas.
 
The lack of attacks raises further questions – why would the GOP (the group that leaked the information) warn of attacks and in spite of the movie being released, not follow through? Was it because of the possibly heightened security measures that were put in places where the movie was released or was it because this was a PR campaign?
 
There are more questions than answers where this incident is concerned. Over the coming months, we expect that only more questions will be raised than answers received.