Why Sony Pictures should release The Interview online
Here's the thing about the Sony hack: From an info-sec standpoint, this is one of the first times a hack has taken place that actually resembles how Hollywood has portrayed them. Hacks happen all the time, if you monitor the tech sector you are familiar with this. But the thing about these hacks is that they are usually meant to glean some sort of customer information that can be used for fraudulent purposes, like credit card and social security numbers, etc.
Most hacks are discovered after the fact. Sometimes months afterwards. The reason for this is that hackers, by and large, don't want to be discovered. They want to get in and out of systems they compromise in complete secrecy, ideally employing zero-day exploits that no one knows about and no one knows to defend against. Get in, get the data, get out, leave no trace that you were there.
The Sony hack here is completely different from them, and it is enormous in its magnitude. The hackers didn't try to remove the fact they were there. They willfully destroyed huge amounts of data and made off with terabytes of it, I've seen estimates of 150+ terabytes. They literally got everything. They've released emails, unreleased movies, medical records...they got it all. And that's far from all they did. They brought the entire organization to its knees by sending them back 30 years when they completely disabled every workstation and email server. This isn't a profit-seeking hack, it is full-scale cyberterrorism against a company by people who want to destroy it completely. They've held the data they've stolen as ransom, dripping it out slowly in chunks to magnify the damage of them. The class action lawsuits by Sony employees (and former employees) are already starting to be filed.
My theory? This isn't North Korean talent, but I think they are mercenaries funded by North Korea. A couple of weeks ago, when the threats against showing The Interview started and that Korean characters were found in the code of the exploit, it could have been said that it was a fancy red herring to draw attention away from the real perpetrator. Threats of physical terrorism against the American public have been made now, and to me that means they have played a card that no one would do unless they are or represent the offending party, and that can only be North Korea now (whether they are employing Iranian or Chinese hackers to carry it out).
The sheer balls they have to take the threats out of the digital realm and into the real world, against innocent people, is shocking. The rhetoric is out of a Hollywood movie. The whole thing is just unreal, and has never been experienced before. I don't think anyone actually will be in danger when (if?) the movie launches on Christmas, but the fact they have an entire industry in this country starting to fold like a cheap tent shows just how deadly serious people are taking it. Thats why, if nothing else, I hope Sony just releases it online (as suggested in the link I posted) to get it out there, even if the movie theaters won't play ball. Go down swinging. I think the American public will have their back if they do, and help assuage the fact that terrible, TERRIBLE security protocols by Sony, who knew they weren't that secure (leaked emails testify to this), were why this happened in the first place.