I am starting to believe that it was a publicity stunt by Sony. With all this they have the makings of a sequel playing out in the press.
I don’t think it was Sony because of the leaked inflammatory race emails. They wouldn’t rain that kind of hell on themselves.
Sony made terrorist threats against the chains that they depend upon to promote a throw away movie? In the process, they release thousands of social security numbers and private information on employees, and leak 4 upcoming films they do care about?
Wow, who knew that Seth Rogan was such a powerhouse for the studio that they’d expose Sony to tens of billions in losses if this supposed truth ever came out. Not to mention real jail time.
No, I do not believe Sony was behind this. Wired’s indications it wasn’t a nation state actually gives more credence that it was North Korea - most of their hacking is script kiddie in nature. They use the exploits that others find, their hackers are individualistic and troll the undernet, they use sites with high bandwidth outside of N Korea, and frequently demand ransom. Hacktavists rarely make physical threats, where as the North Koreans almost always do.
Could it be someone else? Possibly - but doubtful. The personal data was worth millions in black market sales, the stolen movies could easily have been ransomed, and the threats pretty much assured that governments would pull all stops to backtrack the data. Russians are in it for the money, Chinese for power, Iranian hackers destroy.