INSIDE THE SONY HACK

Heckenlively conducts an inquiry into the headline-grabbing cyberattack on Hollywood.

At the heart of this “fractured fairy tale of Hollywood, international affairs, and cyber-criminals” is the hack of Sony Pictures in 2014, in which a vast amount of confidential information about Sony employees and their families, as well as details about and footage from upcoming Sony movies, was scooped up by a hacking group calling itself the “Guardians of Peace” and partially released to the public. At the time, there was speculation that the hack had been sponsored by the North Korean government in retaliation for the 2014 movie The Interview, in which two American journalists are recruited by the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong-un (Sony pulled the movie from mainstream distribution). Heckenlively asks, “Did Kim Jong-un decide that even a fictional account of his assassination by the CIA was a threat?” The author delves into everything that’s publicly known about the hack, sifting through a decade’s worth of interviews and news reports about the incident. He’s guided at many points by the experiences of two pseudonymous insiders, “Mr. Grey,” a former music industry professional, and “Eric,” a cyber-security expert. Eschewing the crackpot flavor of some of his earlier books (including one co-written with Alex Jones), Heckenlively here hews very closely to a purely factual reconstruction of events (allowing that the cyberhackers “may have been so good at concealing their true identities, that they may have genuinely deceived the North Korean dictator, the Hollywood executives, and our own intelligence agencies”), and even his occasional anti-establishment asides are thought-provoking, as when he wonders if the vilification of North Korea is a convenient political lie. Some of the details he reveals about Sony’s computer systems (there was no security; “Somebody could have literally walked into the computer room, plugged in a flash drive, and started downloading data”) are likewise fascinating.

A lively, open-sourced account of the infamous 2014 Sony hack.