Sony Hackers Seen Having Snooped for Months, Planted Software Bomb

Hackers who broke into Sony Corp. (6758)’s Hollywood unit probably spent months collecting passwords and mapping the network before they committed a last act of vandalism, setting off a virus that wiped out data and crashed the system in 10 minutes.

Trend Micro Inc. (4704) arrived at these conclusions after running simulations on a copy of the virus that struck Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computers. The Tokyo-based developer of security software declined to reveal where it got the malware.

The research details methods used by hackers in what’s become one of the highest-profile cyber-attacks in history. Since November, a group calling itself Guardians of Peace has released private e-mails, salaries and health records of Sony employees to stop the release of “The Interview,” a comedy about a plot to assassinate North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un.

“They were probably in the system for months,” Masayoshi Someya, whose title is security evangelist at Trend Micro, said in an interview in Tokyo this month. “One thing that’s very unique about the malware is that it had a payload with a particular time bomb-type capability.”

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-19/sony-hackers-seen-having-snooped-for-months-planted-bomb.html