Screen on Fire - 2014 Sony Pictures Attacks and the Era of State Retaliation (November-December 2014)

Screen on Fire - 2014 Sony Pictures Attacks and the Era of State Retaliation (November-December 2014)

In 2014, Sony Pictures was attacked by the North Korean hacker group Guardians of Peace (GOP), resulting in a massive leak of unreleased movies, employee information and internal emails. The cause is believed to be retaliation for "The Interview," a film about North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, and the attackers demanded that the screening of the film be stopped. Major multiplexes successively canceled screenings of the film. President Obama condemned North Korea's involvement as a "challenge to freedom of expression," and the FBI declared it a state-sponsored attack based on the malware's code match. The incident was noted as the first "expression-suppression cyber attack" that crossed the boundary between entertainment and politics, and symbolized an era in which private companies became targets of state conflicts. Since then, the Lazarus Group's attacks have expanded to a global scale, marking a turning point in the realization of cyber warfare.