LOS ANGELES — The nightmare just won’t end for Sony.
On Thursday, WikiLeaks released what they called “Sony Files Part 2,” dumping 276,394 more private documents, emails and financial data onto their servers for the world to see.
The release of Sony’s sensitive data appears to be in conjunction with the third anniversary of Julian Assange’s encampment in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Assange, an Australian Internet activist, founded WikiLeaks in 2006.
According to SlashGear.com, the new cache cuts a vast swathe across Sony’s communications, with everything from travel calendars to contact detail lists, event planning and expense reports spanning multiple years and employees.
Less than an hour later, WikiLeaks then helpfully tweeted this headline-friendly bit: “Sony Pictures legal entanglements including an investigation for bribery” – adding a link to a collection of confidential attorney documents.
Sony was originally hit by hackers Nov. 24. A glowing red skeleton appeared on screens throughout the Culver City, Calif.-based Sony subsidiary. The hack apparently was in response to the planned release of The Interview, which featured James Franco and Seth Rogen as tabloid TV journalists recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
The hacking revealed everything from employees’ private medical information to sensitive celebrity details, including correspondence from Angelina Jolie to then-Sony head Amy Pascal, pay disparity between Jennifer Lawrence and her male co-stars inAmerican Hustle and Emma Stone’s phone number and email address.
“I was so overwhelmed that I went to my inbox and I deleted all my emails,” Stone told the Wall Street Journal recently. “In about a 30-second span, I hit ‘Select All’ and ‘Delete Forever,’ and thousands of emails, like six years of emails, are now gone forever. I was just so freaked out that someone was in there.”
She added: “It was horrible. I cried for like an hour. Most of the emails I’m mourning I can still talk to the person and get them back. But there’s others where the person is actually gone. It really sucks.”
The FBI eventually confirmed that North Korea was behind the attack, and on Jan. 7, FBI Director James Comey sought to reassure doubters. He said that the Sony hackers – who called themselves Guardians of Peace – occasionally failed to hide their identity through proxy servers.
The hackers “got sloppy” when sending e-mails and posting online, Comey said. This allowed the feds to trace them to IP addresses “exclusively used by the North Koreans.”
WikiLeaks released its first cache of Sony documents on April 16. It included 30,287 documents from Sony Pictures Entertainment along with 173,132 emails.
The site calls them “The Sony Archives” and has conveniently organized them into a searchable database, rather than the simple stash of files that the hackers put up online when they originally began releasing them in December of last year.
The legality of posting the documents is murky. They were stolen from Sony when the computer system in its Culver City offices was penetrated by hackers last year. Under U.S. law, Sony holds copyright to them and they can’t be legally published without the company’s permission.
Sony’s lawyers have send multiple letters warning various online sites that it considers the material stolen and threatening legal action should the files and emails be used or posted.
However WikiLeaks, a non-profit organization based in Sweden, considers itself a journalistic site that specializes in posting secret and classified information. It placed its headquarters in the Scandinavian country because of its strong laws protecting the relationship between journalists and their sources.
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