This weekend, the “Guardians of Peace”—the cyber-attackers who brought Sony Pictures Entertainment’s network down in November and have since shared over a terabyte of the company’s internal data—made two more dumps of SPE data to file sharing sites and torrents. The second of the two, on Sunday, was the e-mail box of Sony Pictures Releasing International president Steven O’Dell. And the hackers promised a “Christmas present” soon of even more data if the company does not relent and meet their unspecified demands.
"We are preparing for you a Christmas gift," the GoP said in a post to Pastebin and Friendpaste. "The gift will be larger quantities of data. And it will be more interesting.The gift will surely give you much more pleasure and put Sony Pictures into the worst state. Please send an email titled by 'Merry Christmas' at the addresses below to tell us what you want in our Christmas gift."
As the breach spills into another week, details have emerged that suggest the attack may have begun much earlier this year, or even earlier, and that the attackers were able to collect significant intelligence on the network from Sony Pictures’ own IT department. It's clear that those behind the attack were deep inside Sony's network for a long time before they set off the malware that erased Sony hard drives—and some of the data they collected could have been used in other attacks.
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