Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
Fury was one of the unreleased movies leaked after the cyber attack on Sony Pictures. Ahn Young-joon/AP Photo
fight fire with fire
Sony fights back against hackers by attacking sites sharing its stolen data
The company is reportedly trying to disrupt downloads of its stolen files by launching Denial of Service attacks on torrent sites.
SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT is attempting to disrupt torrent sites which are offering downloads of sensitive data exposed during a cyber attack in late November.
Re/Code is reporting that Sony is using Amazon Web Services, the online retailer’s cloud computing service, to carry out the counterattack.
By using hundreds of computers in Asia, it’s performing a Denial of Service attack on services where its stolen data is available.
This tactic was used during the early days of file sharing by media companies as a way of combating internet movie and music piracy as a way of slowing down downloads and limit access.
A group called Guardians of Peace claimed to have stolen under 100 terabytes (roughly 100,000 GB) of data from Sony Pictures. This included financial information, budgets, payroll data, internal emails and feature films and portions of this data has been slowly leaked on to public file-sharing sites like PasteBin.
Some of the files leaked included private correspondence between producers and executives which featured disputes over the Steve Jobs movie that went to Universal, an attempt to get Spider-Man into Captain America 3, and Community star Joel McHale asking for a discount on a Sony TV after Sony canceled the show (before it was picked up by Yahoo).
Sony is working with the FBI to try and track down those responsible for the attacks, where one official said that the malware used would have gone past most online defences.
have your say