LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess) — Following a catastrophic attack on Sony Picture's computers, which exposed virtually every private piece of information in the company's networks, Sony Pictures may be fighting back.
According to a story reported by technology news website Re/code, Sony Pictures is using a cluster of computers in Asia to launch distributed denial of service attacks against computers hosting the distribution of their pilfered files.
Leaked information reportedly included data about employee salary data, including social security and health information; internal emails that contained at times, petty comments about colleagues; and information about deals with third parties, including what Sony paid to secure rights for potential film projects.
Fomenting a distributed denial of service attack, which constitutes flooding a computer's network connection with data, rendering it unreachable, would likely be a criminal violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the United States. Under the CFAA, intentionally damaging a computer system, including “any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information” may constitute a violation of the act.
Sony Pictures did not comment on the story, while Amazon responded in a seemingly carefully parsed statement, telling Re/code: “The activity being reported is not currently happening on AWS (Amazon Web Service),” but declined to comment on any activity that happened on their networks previously.
If true, this would not be Sony's first brush with distributed denial of service attacks to protect their intellectual property. In 2007, Sony was apparently revealed in an email leak to be one of the clients of MediaDefender, a company that allegedly performed denial of service attacks against file sharing services where they thought intellectual property was being exchanged.
– Staff Writers
