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Marc W. Rogers, a "whitehat" hacker and security researcher at the online-traffic-optimizer CloudFlare, wrote on his personal blog that he's betting on "a disgruntled (possibly ex) employee of Sony." He notes that there were multiple ways hackers could have made money from stealing Sony's information, and a nation-state could have used its access to Sony to gain more information about the film industry. Instead, Guardians of Peace chose to dump the information in a manner that's extremely embarrassing to Sony.
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It’s clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sony’s internal architecture and access to key passwords. While it’s plausible that an attacker could have built up this knowledge over time and then used it to make the malware, Occam’s razor suggests the simpler explanation of an insider. It also fits with the pure revenge tact that this started out as.
This theory is supported by what people claiming to be affiliated with the Sony hackers told the Verge last month. "Sony doesn't lock their doors, physically, so we worked with other staff with similar interests to get in," a hacker going by the name "lena" said via email. "Im sorry I can't say more, safety for our team is important [sic]." The group called Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton a "criminal" on Twitter, and another hacker said, "We Want equality [sic]. Sony doesn't. It's an upward battle."
A more mainstream variation on this theory is that North Korea was behind the attack, but they had help from someone affiliated with Sony. TMZ reported that multiple Sony sources said they believe this is what happened, with some suggesting "a possible link between the hackers and Sony layoffs, which included a large number of IT employees." The New York Times report that revealed the government had concluded North Korea was "centrally involved" also noted that investigators are considering the possibility that it was partially an inside job:
At Sony, investigators are looking into the possibility that the attackers had inside help. Embedded in the malicious code were the names of Sony servers and administrative credentials that allowed the malware to spread across Sony’s network.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/12/4-alternate-theories-on-who-hacked-sony.htmlI'm thinking A LOT of people have been duped.
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I have better things to spend $5 on. Like... losing $5 in the sofa or something.
