Hello and welcome to Malicious Life. I'm Ran Levy.

November 24, 2014 was a very bad day to the IT staff of Sony Pictures, the movie production and

distribution giant.

Sony Pictures Computer Network was hacked and the hackers who infiltrated it, a group that called

itself the Guardians of Peace, stole terabytes of important and sensitive information.

Movies that had not yet been released, personal

details and salaries of thousands of employees, and embarrassing internal

emails between senior officials that contain juicy gossip on Hollywood stars, sexist

comments and other sorts of things people say when they think that nobody is watching.

The hackers not only stole this information, but also wiped

information stored on many of Sony's servers. The Sony Pictures hack caused tremendous economic damage to the company,

greatly embarrassed it and even brought about a complete shutdown of the company's

network for several days.

Still, it was just company's network for several days.

Still, it was just a hack.

Sony was neither the first nor the last organization to suffer such a break-in.

Though it did make some security researchers raise an eyebrow.

There was something familiar about the malware tools used by the hackers.

This familiarity prompted a number of information security companies to launch a deeper and

more thorough investigation into the Sony breach and the fish their researchers caught were much bigger than anyone had imagined.

The investigation into the Sony Pictures Heck led to the discovery of a much larger and more serious affair and the exposure of one of the most

dangerous hacker groups in the history of information security.

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