EP032

Sony Breachpocolypse

Music provided by: Denis Kreynin https://soundcloud.com/denis-kreynin
Recorded December 10 2014

Follow-up

Last week we touched on AdBlock Plus as a defense against offensive advertisement. An interesting article came out where advertisers are suing AdBlock Plus for ruining their revenue model.

This week’s notes

Everyone’s talking about the hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) and coming up with crazy theories of who’s behind it, why, and how, so we do too! Coverage of this all started with (news of Sony employees getting shut out of their computers). What initially made this event so interesting for us to cover on this show are the layers of details revealed in articles like https://variety.com/2014/biz/news/sony-targeted-by-apparent-hack-attack-to-corporate-systems-1201363734/ including the complete shutdown of their computing environment from anywhere between 1 day and 3 weeks, the fact that bring your own device is a big part of their IT, and looks like the motivator is blackmail.

Then the first signs of stolen information began to come to light and this took on an entirely different viewpoint. Brian Krebs of Krebsonsecurity.com fame did a great write-up and within the comments section shared a directory listing of some of what was allegedly taken and you can see some damning things from there.

Here’s links to other reference material used within this show, including the stuff for my hair-brained theory on how SPE was compromised this time:
Sony hack worse than everyone thought
Really good breakdown on the Sony breach impact, Mandiant involvement, and ID theft already happening against employees
Bluecoat’s breakdown on the malware used
Press release on 2011 Lulzsec breach of SPE
Fallout from the 2011 Lulzsec breach
Microsoft’s announcement of the Kerberos vulnerability patch
A better explanation of how the Active Directory kerberos vulnerability worked and a little on the weaponization of the exploit