WATCH: Hackers appear to have leaked some movies from Sony Pictures following a cyber-attack last week that took the company’s internal services offline for days. Nicole Bogart reports.
TORONTO – Five Sony Pictures films have been leaked online following a cyber-attack on the company, including the remake of the classic film Annie that isn’t supposed to hit theatres until Dec. 19.
Official DVD screener versions of Mr. Turner, Still Alice, To Write Love on Her Arms, and Brad Pitt’s latest film Fury have been garnering thousands of downloads on illegal file sharing websites since leaking online. Fury has been downloaded over 1.2 million times since Nov. 30 and Annie, staring Cameron Diaz, has reached about 206,000 downloads, according to piracy tracking firm Excipio.
Sony has not yet confirmed the authenticity of the leak.
Rumoured North Korea connections
Many reports have speculated that the cyber-attack could be linked to Sony Pictures’ forthcoming film The Interview, in which comedians Seth Rogen and James Franco star as journalists who are enlisted by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un during an interview.
North Korea has threatened “merciless retaliation” against the U.S. and any other country that allows the film to be played.
According to a report by technology news site Recode citing unnamed sources, Sony is looking into the possibility that the cyber-attack originated from North Korea.
“Sony and outside security consultants are actively exploring the theory that the hack may have been carried out by third parties operating out of China on North Korea’s behalf. The sources stress that a link to North Korea hasn’t been confirmed, but has not been ruled out, either,” read the report.
Not the first time Sony Pictures has been targeted
In May 2011, Sony Pictures’ database was breached by a member of the hacker group LulzSec. The hacker stole personal data including the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of tens of thousands of Sony customers and distributed it online.
READ MORE: Who is LulzSec?
In 2013, 25-year-old Cody Andrew Kretsinger, who went by the online nickname “recursion,” was sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay $605,663 in restitution for the hack.
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