Report claims U.S. officials believe North Korea hired foreign hackers to hack Sony

After Sony was hacked and its sensitive information have been dumped on the Internet, the FBI named North Korea as the culprit behind the hack. A new report from Reuters cites an official “close to the investigation” that says the U.S. officials believe North Korea hired foreign hackers from outside the country to hack Sony Pictures Entertainment. According to the source, North Korea doesn’t have the capability to “conduct some elements of the sophisticated campaign by itself.” While they maintain that North Korea is behind the “theft and destruction of data” of Sony Pictures Entertainment, the reports says the U.S. officials are investigating if North Korea really did contract hackers from outside its country.

Source: Reuters | Via: Ubergizmo

Sony PlayStation Network back up after hack

It’s not been an easy couple of weeks for Sony but they seem to be working some things out. The latest denial of service attack by the Lizard Squad knocked out the PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live three days ago. Sony seems to have gotten its bearings back and PSN is up and running for all its consoles. The company warns of some “intermittency” still but there shouldn’t be any major downtime happening soon.

Source: PlayStation Blog + PlayStation Support | Via: Engadget

Update on Monday, December 29, 2014 at 9:52AM by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Looks like access to the service is still spotty. Stay tuned.

Unreleased Sony Pictures movies were stolen and made available on torrent sites after hack

Various still unreleased Sony Picture movies have started to propagate torrent sites as a result of a recent hack into Sony Studios' system.

The movies include Annie, Fury, Mr. Turner and Still Alice are reportedly of high quality and possibly to be used as screeners for upcoming award shows or for advance reviews. Many of these films haven't even hit theatres yet and a leak of this magnitude could potentially affect box office sales in what has already been a lukewarm year for feature films. Nobody has come forward to claim responsibility for the theft but the same hackers that took down Sony's computers last week are being cited as the culprit of this massive leak.

Source: Engadget

Hackers take personal data in Kickstarter breach

Hackers have recently infiltrated Kickstarter to take personal information from users.  Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler said in a blog post the breach did not give hackers access to credit card information. But it gave them access to usernames, email addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses, and encrypted passwords. The company urges all users to change their passwords for their accounts and for any other site that uses the same password. The company did not reveal the number of customers affected by the breach.