Tag: the interview
Sony Seeks To Delay Earnings Over ‘The Interview’ Cyberattack

Sony Seeks To Delay Earnings Over ‘The Interview’ Cyberattack

Tokyo (AFP) – Sony said Friday it was asking Japanese regulators for permission to delay its earnings release next month after a cyberattack at its Hollywood film unit compromised “a large amount of data”.

The Japanese firm said its US-based Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) subsidiary will not have time to put together its financial statements after the attack, linked to its controversial North Korea satire The Interview, which has been widely blamed on Pyongyang.

The Tokyo-based firm, which was due to publish its earnings for the fiscal third quarter on February 4, said the hack attack was unlikely to have a material impact on its financial results.

But it now wants to extend the deadline to file the numbers until the end of March.

The company said it still planned to issue a press release and hold an earnings conference on the originally scheduled date.

This was to provide updated forecasts of its results “to the extent reasonably possible, based on the information available on that date”.

The Interview was scheduled for a Christmas Day release before Sony became the target of the biggest cyberattack in US corporate history.

Threats made by hackers prompted Sony to initially cancel its theatrical release. It was eventually screened in select arthouse cinemas, and released on the Internet and via cable TV providers.

Washington has blamed North Korea for the hack on Sony — a claim Pyongyang has denied while still strongly condemning the film, which features a fictional plot to assassinate leader Kim Jong-un.

The Interview, which had a $44 million budget, has since become Sony’s highest-grossing online film ever, reportedly making more than $40 million on the Internet and other small-screen formats.

“Serious disruption”

The cyberattack caused “a serious disruption of SPE’s network systems… including the destruction of network hardware and the compromise of a large amount of data,” Sony said, adding that it was forced to shut down its entire network after the hack.

It affected most of the subsidiary’s “financial and accounting applications and many other critical information technology applications,” which will not be functional until early February, it added.

The company said its film unit has since “worked aggressively” to restore those systems.

While the film division has been one of the vast company’s best-performing businesses, Sony announced a whopping $109.1 billion yen ($923 million) six-month loss in October and said it was on track to lose 230 billion yen in the fiscal year through March, more than four times its earlier forecast.

Sony has struggled in the consumer electronics business that built its global brand, including losing billions of dollars in televisions over the past decade as fierce competition from lower-cost rivals pummelled the TV subsidiary’s finances.

The company is undergoing a huge restructuring, including job cuts and the sale of its Manhattan headquarters, is it tries to drag itself out of the red.

As part of the shakeup, Sony sold its personal computer business, announced it would cut its smartphone unit’s global staff by 15 percent — about 1,000 jobs — and said it won’t pay dividends for the first time since its shares started trading in Tokyo in 1958.

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North Korea Slams ‘Loser’ Obama For Regime Collapse Remark

North Korea Slams ‘Loser’ Obama For Regime Collapse Remark

Seoul (AFP) – North Korea Sunday described U.S. President Barack Obama as a “loser” over his criticism on its regime, accusing him of being obsessed with hostility towards Pyongyang.

The comment from the North’s foreign ministry came after Obama spoke of the eventual collapse of the regime ruling what he called “the most isolated, the most sanctioned, the most cut-off nation on Earth”.

“We will keep on ratcheting the pressure, but part of what’s happening is… the Internet over time is going to be penetrating this country,” Obama said in an interview on YouTube from the White House last week.

“Over time you will see a regime like this collapse,” he said, adding the U.S. was looking for ways to accelerate the flow of information into the country.

A spokesman for the North’s foreign ministry lashed out at the remarks, describing them as “rubbish”.

“The recent wild remarks made by Obama are nothing but a poor grumble of a loser driven into a tight corner in the all-out standoff with the (North),” the spokesman told state news agency KCNA.

“We cannot but be shocked to find that Obama… is so preoccupied with the inveterate repugnancy and hostility toward a sovereign state.”

Attempts to topple the regime — led by Kim Jong-Un — would only strengthen unity among its people, he said.

The North has often used bombastic and sometimes racist rhetoric to slam Obama and other U.S. leaders.

Last month its top military body chaired by Kim compared Obama to a “monkey” over his support for the screening of a Hollywood comedy hated by Pyongyang.

The Interview — about a fictional plot to assassinate Kim — was released online and in theaters last month, despite devastating cyber attacks on its producer Sony Pictures.

Washington blames Pyongyang for the attacks, a charge the North has angrily denied.

AFP Photo/Roberto Schmidt

Obama Orders New Sanctions Against North Korea In Wake Of Sony Hack

Obama Orders New Sanctions Against North Korea In Wake Of Sony Hack

By Michael A. Memoli, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

HONOLULU — President Barack Obama ordered new economic sanctions Friday against North Korea aimed at increasing financial pressure on the rogue state’s leadership, a preliminary retaliatory action by the Obama administration in response to what it calls the “destructive and coercive” cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment computers.

The executive order signed by the president builds on existing sanctions against North Korea by directing the Treasury Department to cut off access to the U.S. financial sector for ten individuals and three government entities identified as key operatives engaged in hostile behavior, including the country’s intelligence agency and defense officials.

As U.S. law enforcement agencies continue to investigate the hacking of Sony computers, the administration describes Friday’s action as only the “first aspect” of its response to the nation’s “ongoing provocative, destabilizing, and repressive actions and policies.”

“We take seriously North Korea’s attack that aimed to create destructive financial effects on a U.S. company and to threaten artists and other individuals with the goal of restricting their right to free expression,” White House spokesman Joshua Earnest said in a statement.

Obama had promised a “proportional response” to the Sony hacking, which U.S. officials believe North Korean agents directed in response to Sony’s planned release of The Interview, a comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco that features a fictional plot to assassinate President Kim Jong Un.

Sony declined to comment on the new round of sanctions.

Experts have questioned how much more the U.S. could do given the array of strict sanctions already in place. Obama’s order notes three previous rounds of penalties imposed against the nation, two during his presidency, in response to its nuclear weapons program.

Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew described the new actions as a powerful tool against the country.

“These steps underscore that we will employ a broad set of tools to defend U.S. businesses and citizens, and to respond to attempts to undermine our values or threaten the national security of the United States,” he said in a statement. “The actions taken today under the authority of the president’s new executive order will further isolate key North Korean entities and disrupt the activities of close to a dozen critical North Korean operatives.”

In a letter to congressional leaders, the president said he has determined that North Korea’s cyber aggression violated four United Nations Security Council resolutions and constituted “a continuing threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

“The order is not targeted at the people of North Korea, but rather is aimed at the government of North Korea and its activities that threaten the United States and others,” he said.

Obama issued the order from Hawaii, where he is nearing the end of a vacation with his family. The president is due to return to Washington over the weekend ahead of the start of the new congressional session.
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(Los Angeles Times staff writer Ryan Faughnder contributed to this report.)

Photo: Keith Martin via Flickr

Doubts Remain On North Korea Role In Sony Attack

Doubts Remain On North Korea Role In Sony Attack

Washington (AFP) – Even after Washington pointed the finger at North Korea for the massive cyber attack on Sony Pictures, some experts say the evidence is far from clear cut.

President Barack Obama earlier this month took the unusual step of naming North Korea for the crippling attack, while promising that the United States would “respond proportionately” after the FBI said evidence pointed to Pyongyang.

But a number of cyber security specialists argue that links to North Korea are uncertain, and that some evidence leads elsewhere.

“I’m skeptical about the claim and I would be even more skeptical that the North Koreans did it on their own without help from a third party or government,” said John Dickson, a former air force intelligence officer who is now a partner in the cyber security firm Denim Group.

The North Koreans “certainly have the will to poke us in the eye,” but “don’t have the critical mass skills of other nation states” to carry out an attack of this kind, Dickson told AFP.

Security technologist Bruce Schneier of Co3 Systems, also a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, said he also doubts the role of North Korea.

“The truth is we don’t know,” he said. “There are facts that are classified and not being released.”

Schneier added that “even if we don’t know (who is responsible), it makes sense for us to pretend we know because it serves as a warning to others.”

In a blog post, Schneier said that “clues in the hackers’ attack code seem to point in all directions at once… this sort of evidence is circumstantial at best. It’s easy to fake, and it’s even easier to interpret it incorrectly.”

North Korea has been seen as the source of the malware, presumably due to anger at the cartoonish portrayal of the Pyongyang communist regime in the comedy film The Interview.

But a linguistic-based analysis of the malware by the Israeli-based security firm Taia Global said the native language of the hackers appeared to be Russian, not Korean.

The study concluded that the software authors were not native English speakers, and that the translation errors pointed away from the Koreans.

“We tested for Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Russian and German,” the report said. “Our preliminary results show that Sony’s attackers were most likely Russian, possibly but not likely Korean and definitely not Mandarin Chinese or German.”

Meanwhile, the Politico website reported that the FBI was briefed Monday by the Norse cyber intelligence firm, which believes that laid-off Sony staff working in concert with hackers — not North Korea — were the culprits.

Security experts note that it is relatively easy for hackers to route their attacks through third parties to fake their location and that is nearly impossible to conclusively show the source of an attack.

And Dickson notes that Washington is unlikely to reveal its intelligence sources in the Sony case “because the next set of attackers would change their tactics” to avoid detection.

Johannes Ullrich, dean of research at the SANS Technology Institute, said the attacks could have been carried out by independent hacker groups, possibly with help or direction from North Korea.

“Sometimes state actors use the hacker groups and stay at arm’s length, but are helping these groups,” he told AFP.

The free flow of information among hacker groups and rogue nations could mean multiple parties were involved, Ullrich said.

He noted that the Sony attack “did not require a high level of sophistication, but what it required was persistence, to find the weak spot to get in.”

Researcher Robert Graham at Errata Security said if North Korea had a role in the attacks, it may have been through outside hackers.

“North Korean hackers are trained as professional, nation state hackers,” Graham said in a blog post.

“North Korea may certainly recruit foreign hackers into their teams, or contract out tasks to foreign groups, but it’s unlikely their own cyber soldiers would behave in this way.”

Other experts argue that the Obama administration would not publicly name North Korea unless it had solid evidence.

“I’m amazed that people continue to have doubts,” said James Lewis, a cyber security researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “People love conspiracy theories.”

Lewis said U.S. intelligence has the capability to locate the source of the attacks, and there is no domestic political need to blame North Korea.

“The intelligence community would never have let (Obama) stick his neck out on this unless they had a high degree of confidence about this,” he said.

Paul Rosenzweig, a former U.S .Homeland Security official who now heads a consulting group, said “it is worth considering the opposing view.”

“In the post-Watergate/post-Snowden world, the (government) can no longer simply say ‘trust us,'” he wrote in a post on the Lawfare blog.

“Not with the U.S. public and not with other countries. Though the skepticism may not be warranted, it is real.”

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