The Big Picture - 1. The World Will Be Full of Fear | The Hollywood Hack

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

‘The Hollywood Hack’ is a three-part narrative series chronicling the biggest Hollywood heist of all time: In the fall of 2014, a group of cyberterrorists hacked Sony Pictures, stealing hundreds of thousands of documents. The materials were eventually leaked online, causing an international incident that would change Hollywood forever.  In Episode 1, thousands of Sony employees show up for work on November 24, 2014—only to discover a menacing message on their screens. It soon becomes clear that the studio has been targeted by a mysterious foreign power—all because of a goofy buddy-comedy called ‘The Interview.’  Host: Brian Raftery  Producers: Devon Baroldi, Brian Raftery, and Vikram Patel Sound Design: Devon Renaldo Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, Bay Picture listeners. For the next week, Sean and I are handing the feed over to a narrative podcast called The Hollywood Hack, which chronicles the 2014 cyber attack on Sony Pictures and the enlightening and embarrassing fallout from it. It's hosted by longtime Ringer contributor and friend of the podcast, Brian Raftery, who you might remember from a few other narrative podcasts

that have run on this feed over the past few years. Do We Get to Win This Time and Gina Roger. Sean and I will be back next week. When Barack Obama strolled into the White House briefing room on December 19th, 2014, you could tell he was happy the year was finally over. Hello, everybody. I ain't really got a full house today, huh?

Well, all I want for Christmas is to take your questions. It was the president's year-end press conference. One last chance for reporters to grill Obama before he headed out for vacation. Not that he'd get much time to relax. Overseas, he was dealing with an escalating war between Russia and Ukraine, not to mention an Ebola outbreak in West Africa. And at home, Obama was feuding with Republicans over immigration. But the first question that afternoon was about a different crisis altogether,

one that was unfolding on a 45-acre movie studio lot in Culver City, Los Angeles. Let's start in North Korea, because that seems to be the biggest topic today. What does a proportional response look like to the Sony hack? The Sony hack. It's probably been a while since you heard those words. Maybe you've forgotten all about the hack. Or maybe you worked at Sony at the time and have spent the last decade trying to forget about the hack, which is totally understandable. Either way, here's a quick download. Ten years ago, a group of cyber terrorists pulled off the most daring and most damaging Hollywood heist of all time. They broke into Sony Pictures' computer system and stole hundreds of thousands of Sony documents, documents that were eventually made public. That included everything from employee medical records to salary statements

to some very personal email exchanges. Eventually, reports emerged that the attack had been carried out by North Korea as retaliation for a forthcoming Sony comedy called The Interview. It stars Seth Rogen and James Franco as American TV journalists who are recruited to assassinate one of the most mysterious political figures of the 21st century, Kim Jong-un. You want us to assassinate the leader of North Korea? Yes. What? The interview was supposed to open on thousands of movie screens on Christmas Day 2014.

But then the hackers, or at least people claiming to be the hackers, threatened to attack theaters that played the film. In one message, they even invoked 9-11. Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made. The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September, 2001. After that warning, several big movie chains decided not to play the interview. Then, Sony announced the movie simply wouldn't open at all. To some Americans, the message was clear. The terrorists had won.

So it makes sense that Sony's response to the hack was on reporters' minds during Obama's press conference. Or does that set a dangerous precedent in place for this kind of situation? Obama acknowledged the damage Sony had suffered. I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced. Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake. I wish they had spoken to me first. By then, the hack was nearly a month old. Yet there were still so many unknowns. Were these warnings for real? And if so, why would anyone get all worked up about a buddy comedy full of poop and dick jokes?

Even Obama couldn't figure that last one out. I think it says something interesting about North Korea that they decided to have the state mount an all-out assault on a movie studio because of a satirical movie starring Seth Rogen and James Flacco. Yes, he said Flacco. Look, he'd had a long couple of weeks. But the notion that that was a threat to them I think gives you some sense of the kind of regime we're talking about here. Look, he'd had a long couple of weeks. But the notion that that was a threat to them,

I think gives you some sense of the kind of regime we're talking about here. They caused a lot of damage. And we will respond. Ten years after the Sony hack, and the fallout over the interview, the whole thing is still so weird. The idea that a bunch of American entertainers could create an international incident seems ridiculous, even to a guy who made a movie about that exact same thing. It was very surreal.

That's Dan Sterling, who co-wrote the interview and was one of its executive producers. The implications were so massive that I didn't know how to look at them any other way than kind of comedic. Like, oh, that'd be funny if I wrote a movie that somehow led to a nuclear detonation. While that never happened, the Sony hack did have long-lasting repercussions, especially in Hollywood. At first, all those leaked Sony emails seemed like just a gossipy distraction. A look at the sometimes boring and sometimes chaotic conversations that go on between actors and filmmakers.

For example, here's how Channing Tatum reacted in 2014 when he learned that Sony's 22 Jump Street had just had a big opening weekend. One even bigger than that of a certain talking teddy bear movie. F you, Ted. Second of all time, biatch. A few quick things I should note here. First off, that's not actually Channing Tatum's voice. Like all the email passages you'll be hearing on this show, it's from someone in the ringer office. In this case, Steve Allman. Second, we found these emails through WikiLeaks, which put the contents of the Sony hack online in the spring of 2015. And finally, the rest of Channing's email is basically him going

HAHAHAHAHA in all caps for several pages. So yeah, there was a lot of ridiculous stuff to be found in the stolen Sony data. But as the documents began to leak online, sometimes in random batches, sometimes in giant bursts, readers found things that didn't reflect well on Hollywood. Specifically, a lot of emails that, when taken together, revealed some hard truths. Truths about the overwhelming whiteness of corporate America. About how women are valued less and paid less than their male colleagues.

About how powerful people talk when they think no one's listening. Everybody knows how studios work in a way that they didn't know before. That's Ben Fritz, who covered the Sony hack for the Wall Street Journal. As far as penetrating the public consciousness and really demystifying and to a certain extent de-glamorizing, Hollywood Studios is one of the biggest impacts the hack had. For a hundred years, Hollywood's greatest product has always been, well, Hollywood. Through a mix of spectacle and spin, the industry could always put a good face on pretty much any disaster. But this was a story Hollywood couldn't control.

And the revelations from the Sony hack laid bare what most people already suspected, that the business of making movies and TV could be nasty and petty and unfair, just like every other business in the world. And when those leaks came out, when people saw big-time Hollywood players making racially charged jokes, or learned that female actresses were getting shafted over money. It reminded people of the screwed-up politics at their own workplace. Still, while the Sony hack was a seismic event, one that reverberated from Hollywood to the White House to the rest of the world,

it feels like it's faded from memory a bit. And I get why. After all, this was a story that changed from hour to hour And when you look back at the 2010s The Sony hack is just one of several fucked up events in a decade that was full of them It's no wonder a lot of people have forgotten about it But the hack is worth looking back on now This was a moment when the worlds of entertainment, media, technology, and politics all collided

A moment when a ridiculous buddy comedy became a global target, and then a national rallying cry. So if you want to understand how the Sony hack upended Hollywood, and the lives of the people within it, stick around for the next three episodes. We'll relive an unusual battle in modern American history. One that began not with a bang, nor even a whimper, but with, well...

Oh, excuse me. Did you just shart? No, I didn't. It was a dead camera guy. It wasn't me. Ladies and gentlemen, Kim Jong-un has just pooed in his pants. From Spotify and The Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery,

and this is The Hollywood Hack. Episode 1, The World Will Be Full of Fear. In 2012, just two years before the hack was discovered, Sony Pictures decided to celebrate its big-screen history by erecting a giant rainbow on the northeast side of the studio lot.

The rainbow is a thick, twisty piece of steel that reaches nearly 100 feet high. It's a nod to The Wizard of Oz, which was filmed on a soundstage here back in the 1930s, when MGM owned the property. Somewhere over the rainbow people actually work here. About 3,500 people, in fact. From sound editors to carpenters to accountants. Still, as far as corporate offices go, the Sony lot is pretty cool. If you wander around long enough, you can look inside the massive sound stages,

where scenes from some of Sony's biggest films were shot. Films you can recognize from a single line. With great power comes great responsibility. Prestige. Worldwide. Show me the money! And while some of Sony's biggest TV shows, like

Breaking Bad or The Crown, were filmed outside of LA, the lot is still home to two of the studio's long-running game shows. Shows that make your parents yell back their answers at the screen. This is Your Wheel

of Fortune! I've been writing about movies and TV for more than 25 years now. And while I realize I should be totally jaded about these kinds of things, I still love visiting the Sony lot. I mean, you're just a few feet away from where they shot parts of North by Northwest and Singing in the Rain and Starship Troopers.

Come on, how is that not exciting? And I'm not the only one who feels that way. Even people who worked at Sony for years would still get a thrill from stepping onto that lot. You would see the actors and the productions driving around on their golf carts as you're walking on your way to lunch. You really feel like there are movies being made 100 feet from you. That's Marisa McGrath-Liston, who spent nearly two decades at Sony.

I remember one day looking out my window and just sitting right below my window, like kind of on the back side of the lot, was the Ghostbusters car and it was the Breaking Bad RV. That was another moment where I was like, okay, this is cool. There is something magical about being on the lot. That's Michael Fisk. He spent more than 12 years at Sony, where he oversaw an international marketing team. You get to feel how the creative business works. You get a sense of seeing actors on set in makeup and hair walking around. You see the sets that are being put up. I mean, you do get that sense when you're on the lot and you're part of it.

For the most part, the Sony lot in 2024 looks a lot like it did back in 2014, the year the studio was hacked. That's when it was home to one of the most powerful movie executives in Hollywood, Amy Pascal. Will you explain to us about what you do? Oh gosh, okay. I do something that I love. That's Pascal being interviewed by a group of middle school students in the fall of 2011. They're all cramped together on an office couch.

Most of the day, what I get to do is look at scripts and movies and try to understand why something is working and why it's not working and who would be the best person to tell the story. That's on a good day. Pascal joined Sony in the late 1980s, back when it was still Columbia Pictures. Over the next several years, she helped develop some of the studio's biggest hits, everything from Groundhog Day to Sense and Sensibility to A League of Their Own. By the early 2000s, Pascal was running Sony's movie division, making the kinds of films she loved. There were splashy literary

adaptations, like The Da Vinci Code, juicy real-life dramas, like Captain Phillips, and crowd-pleasing comedies, like Hitch and Pineapple Express. Around Hollywood, Pascal was known as a talent whisperer, someone who could charm actors and filmmakers until they saw her way. For example, in the late 90s, Pascal wanted Adam Sandler to star in a comedy about a 30-something doofus who adopts a five-year-old kid. At the time, Sandler was big, but not big-big, and he wasn't into making family comedies. But Pascal was desperate for him to do it. So she traveled to Atlantic City, where she cornered Sandler and

his dad by the slot machines. As Pascal later said, I followed him around and stalked him. She was joking, but all that stalking paid off when Big Daddy became one of the highest-grossing movies of 1999. We stopped serving breakfast at 10.30. Ah, horse shit! No, no, no, don't cry. I'm sorry. I wasn't cursing. And Sandler would go on to make a ton of money for Sony in the years ahead.

All because Pascal wouldn't take no for an answer. She exudes passion and she cannot hide her opinions and thoughts. That's Ben Fritz from the Wall Street Journal again. You know, she has like chunky jewelry and sits there in meetings crisscross, sitting on her couch, like chewing gum. She just is who she is and she lays it out there. It's true. I mean, it's not often you hear a movie exec, or really any executive,

talking about their own career with this kind of honesty. I've made some of the worst movies ever. Instead of making some of the best movies, I turned down Forrest Gump, Speed. And Pascal's not being self-deprecating there. She really did make some bad movies for Sony. The Tourist, Stealth, Jack and Jill. But sometimes, even bad movies make money.

And overall, for much of Pascal's time at Sony, the movie division had a great run. It even topped the box office for a few years. Though to be fair, a lot of the credit for Sony's financial success has to go to the company's CEO, a guy who is Pascal's polar opposite. And welcome all of you to Sony Pictures and this historic studio lot, where movies have been made since 1915 at the dawn of Hollywood. That's Michael Linton speaking to investors in 2013. He's wearing a dark suit and

a sensible haircut, and he's standing on a giant glitzed-up Sony soundstage. But Linton hadn't even stepped foot on the Sony lot when he took the CEO job in 2003. By then, he had been a top-level executive at companies like Disney, Penguin, and Time Warner. As Ben Fritz notes, to most of Hollywood, Linton was an outsider. Michael Linton rarely cared about the actual content of the movies. In fact, it's almost impossible to find a clip of Linton talking about movies at all. Though when he does, like in this podcast interview from 2022,

his comments are pretty controversial. You're a big Tom Cruise fan? I am a big Tom Cruise fan. Linton's job was to deal with things like overhead and partnerships and marketing infrastructure. He'd stand in front of Sony's investors and talk, pretty dryly, about business things. Innovating to meet the evolving tastes of audiences

and the trajectory of technology. You get the idea. Linton's focus was on the big picture, not on wooing stars or fixing third ag problems. That was Pascal's job. When he was hired at Sony, Linton told a reporter, Amy knows the business cold. I don't.

She's picking the pictures. They got along in the sense that they were nice to each other, but they just saw the world so differently. As long as things were going well, it was fine. And at first, things really did go well for Pascal and Linton. And for Sony. After the break, the studio

heads into the 2010s with some big stars. And some big swings. In 2018, Ben Fritz of the Wall Street Journal published a book called The Big Picture. No relation, by the way. Ben's book is a very addicting, very insidery account of Sony's ups and downs over the last few decades. And in the early aughts, Sony's movie division was soaring. The studio had a knack for making crowd-pleasing hits featuring A-list stars.

Movies like Hancock or Click. Sony balanced those with grown-up dramas like Moneyball and Zero Dark Thirty, plus a decent amount of kids' flicks and horror films. It was a good mix. They had made a bunch of original films for adults, all sorts of different films,

romantic comedies and dramas and thrillers. They really cultivated relationships with talent. They were the place that people like Will Smith and Adam Sandler and Nora Ephron loved to work. The studio was also home to a certain billion-dollar web-slinger. Who are you? Who am I? I'm Spider-Man. Sony had released

its first Spider-Man film in 2002 after endless delays. The movie had been a dream project of Pascal's for years and the results? Well, you know.

The swinging through the skyscrapers, the upside-down kiss, the whole Willem Dafonis of it all. That first Spider-Man movie was awesome, and it made a ton of money, and launched a bunch of sequels.

But Spider-Man wasn't Sony's only franchise. The studio also released a bunch of Men in Blacks, a shitload of Smurfs, and in my opinion, nowhere near enough Anacondas. So you're telling me there's some snake orgy out in the jungle? Yeah, something like that. But for the most part, Sony spent the 2000s and the early 2010s

focusing less on IP and more on A-list talent. And as Ben notes, that formula was quickly becoming obsolete. Marvel came out with this new strategy, which was like, forget about original films, forget about a broad diversity of slate, forget about stars being in charge. It's all about franchise IP and a cinematic universe. It was a perfect strategy for a new era,

and Sony was really ill-equipped to compete. Sony did try to make movies the Marvel way, with some terrible results. In 2013, it released After Earth, a $130 million sci-fi drama featuring Will Smith, Jaden Smith, and a whole lot of Dianetics-like dialogue. But if we are going to survive this, you must realize that fear is not real. After Earth was supposed to give Sony its own cinematic universe.

Instead, it became just one of several Sony films to underperform in the summer of 2013, along with Elysium and White House Down. Though White House Down was actually pretty fun. And to make matters worse, the studio's go-to hero was starting to lose his superpowers. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 debuted at the top of the box office when it opened in May 2014. But the movie was ridiculously expensive, not to mention joyless. Plus, it arrived right after a bunch of Sony duds, like the Cameron Diaz comedy Sex Tape and the historical drama Pompeii. By the end of 2014, the last thing anyone at Sony needed was more bad news,

especially Amy Pascal. As she told those kids who'd interviewed her, when you're running a film studio, your survival comes down to one thing. If the movies work, the company's in great shape. If the movies aren't working, the company is not in great shape. And throughout 2014, Sony's movie division was not in great shape. But relief would come that September, courtesy of a gun-toting good guy. That's Denzel Washington in The Equalizer.

That film opened at number one, and it played better than anyone had predicted. This was a great moment for Sony. The studio had a worldwide hit, a new franchise, finally, and a Denzel-sized rebuttal to all the company's critics. Plus, there were a few more potential hits due before 2014 was over, including the interview. So maybe Sony really could end the year on a high note.

Some executives certainly thought so. You can sense their excitement in the emails they wrote to one another around that time. One message captured Sony's festive mood in an all-caps frenzy. I feel like we can fucking conquer the world. Amy Pascal sent that all-caps message at 11.33 a.m. on Sunday, September 28th. By then, hackers had already broken into Sony's network. They were lurking, searching, and quietly waiting for the right time to strike. On the morning of November 24th, 2014,

Andre Caracco was driving to the Sony lot. That's when his assistant called with a strange message. And he says, hey, you know, I turned on my computer and there's these skull and bones that showed up on my computer. And I said, hey, you know, I turned on my computer and there's these skull and bones that showed up on my computer. And I said, well, gee, that's weird. I'll see you in a half hour. Thinking, you know, it's not too big of a deal. I'm sure IT will work it out.

It was the Monday before Thanksgiving, kind of a dead time in Hollywood. Some projects shut down early for the holidays, and a lot of people simply check out altogether. But Andre was a high-ranking executive in the studio's publicity division, and Sony's big year-end movies were just a few weeks away. There was no time for downtime. After Andre arrived at work that day, he headed to the Jimmy Stewart building,

located on the northwestern end of the Sony lot. He'd worked in that building for years. So had Marisa McGrath ListListon, whom we met earlier. She was one of the studio's top publicity executives. And that morning, Marisa had also gotten a heads up that something strange was happening on the lot. We had this lovely gentleman named Rodney, who was our security guard at Jimmy Stewart. And I remember walking in and looking at him, and he just looked at me and he said, don't turn on your computer. But when Marisa arrived at her Stewart, and I remember walking in and looking at him, and he just looked at me and he said, don't turn on your computer.

But when Marisa arrived at her desk, she realized someone else had gotten there first. My computer record had already been pulled out. She wasn't alone. Across the Sony lot, people were rolling into work, only to learn that their computers were unusable, or that they'd been confiscated altogether. And not just in the U.S.

Michael Fisk, the foreign marketing executive, remembers driving to the lot that morning while talking to a colleague in Mexico City. We might have actually been talking about the interview because we were launching the interview trailer that day and the next day around the world. But that strange skeleton image was showing up on computers in Mexico, too. At first, Michael didn't think too much of it. It's like three weeks after Halloween, you know, it's like after the Dia de los Muertos.

But not long after arriving at his office, he heard some commotion in the hallway. And I think it was IT saying, turn down your computers, turn them off. It was almost like someone when they hit the alarm in the building, like the fire alarm, and everyone's like, you want to evacuate? But most of the time

you hear that alarm, you're like, really, am I going to waste my time walking down the stairs to go there and then have to come back into the building and like the fire alarm and everyone's like, you want to evacuate. But most of the time you hear that alarm, you're like, really, am I going to waste my time walking down the stairs to go there and then have to come back into the building? That's how the hack felt at first. Like a big pain in the ass. Not to mention a frustrating start to the week. But as more employees arrived that morning,

it became clear that no one was getting any work done that day. There were signs and leaflets being posted all around the lot, warning employees not to use any of their devices or their Wi-Fi. According to one Sony employee, the company owned nearly 7,000 personal computers. And from that point on, none of them could be trusted. Your phones were down, you couldn't copy, you couldn't print, and so we had access to nothing. The clampdown had begun earlier that morning. That's when several employees, including Amy Pascal, turned on their computers and found an eerie illustration on their screens.

A blood-red skeleton with sharp fangs and absurdly long fingers. To be honest, it was kind of ridiculous looking, like something you might find on a cheapo CD-ROM game from the late 90s. But as silly as that image was, it was accompanied by a menacing threat written out in bold white letters. We've already warned you, and this is just the beginning. We'll continue until our request be met. We've obtained all your internal data,

including your secrets and top secrets. If you don't obey us, we'll release data shown below to the world. The message featured links to several sites containing zip drives, and a claim that Sony's quote-unquote top secrets would be revealed at 11pm Greenwich Mean Time, unless Sony took immediate action. It didn't say what action exactly, and the only clue as to who had carried out the attack was a message at the top of the screen that read,

Hacked by hashtag GOP. No, not that GOP. This one stood for Guardians of Peace. But we'll get to all that later. It was a vague threat, but one that immediately set off alarms inside Sony. You could only call it, what's the kid's book, Alexander's Really Terrible Horrible Horrible Day or whatever it's called. That's Michael Linton, speaking at Vanity Fair's annual New Establishment Summit. The event was held in San Francisco in the fall of 2015, nearly a year since the day Linton learned Sony had been hacked. At that point, you have no idea what's going on. I didn't even understand what exactly was...

We didn't understand the extent of the damage, what had been stolen, any of it. Remember, in those first few hours of the hack, no one knew who the Guardians of Peace were, or how serious their threats may have been. And on that first day, the only official word from Sony was a short press statement saying, we are investigating an IT matter. But of course, this was no typical computer issue. November 24th is a day I will never forget.

That's former Sony executive Michelle Veo. She spent 18 years at the studio, where she oversaw multiple IT teams. Like many Sony employees, Michelle found out about the attack during her drive to work. In my mind, I thought, oh, we were hacked. Okay, we'll get back there. We'll get to work. We'll clean it up in, oh, we were hacked. Okay, we'll get back there. We'll get to work. We'll clean it up in a week or two. We'll be fine. But when she arrived at the lot, Michelle realized there was no way the company would recover that quickly. The hackers had used malware to burrow

into the company's servers, all 1,500 of them, and destroy their root drives. They may as well have just burned all of Sony's servers to the ground. We had recovery plans for earthquakes. We had recovery plans for much less intense and destructive cyber attack. We had recovery plans for power outages, but nothing close to this. Michelle and her IT colleagues were completely locked out of the system. No access to email, to the network, or to anything else that was online. We had our phones and we had ourselves, and that was it. And even that wasn't much help.

Because like everything else, the Sony phone directory was kept online. It took them like 45 minutes to find somebody who had a printed phone directory. That first day, Michelle and her colleagues set up a war room on the second floor of the Irving Thalberg building, a gorgeous old Art Deco structure that served as Sony Pictures headquarters. One of my employees found a roll of butcher paper, and we wallpapered the entire conference room, and we gave ourselves two hours to do nothing but brainstorm what needed to be done right away. Soon, the IT staff was covering the walls with to-do lists.

Getting payroll back online was crucial. So was setting up a new email system. And of course, they had to track down every single Sony computer that had been corrupted. All 7,000 or so. Were any people resistant to hand over their PCs? Without question, yeah. Oh, really? Yeah.

There were people who were absolutely horrified, and in fact, we had to create a brigade of people who went out and found them. As Michelle tells it, the IT staffers eventually moved to a brand new building on the lot. One floor was used for the war room. Another became home to what was called the clean room, an area full of computers that could be spot checked and fitted with new applications. And on the bottom floor, a PC factory. That's where computers were wiped clean so they could eventually be reissued.

All this would be done under heavy security. In fact, when one of Sony's most powerful TV executives stopped by the building for a visit, even he wasn't let in. The person who was at the door is like, your name's not on the list. He said, don't you know who I am? You list. He said, don't you know who I am? You know, that classic line, don't you know who I am?

He was polite, but you know, and they said, no, I'm sorry, your name's not on the list. So in your career, have you ever experienced anything comparable to this? Nothing, nothing like this. The only thing that comes close, Michelle says, was when she was working at another company in the late 1990s. That's when there was a rush to prevent the so-called Millennium Bug. We had lots and lots of time to fix that. There was nothing that was this immediate. You know, this was unlike anything I think anybody has ever seen,

especially in entertainment. Everything about the Sony hack was unprecedented. A new era of sophisticated cyber attacks was underway. This was in the 90s, when hackers were seen as nerdy outsiders, the kind of exotic oddballs that Hollywood loved to put into all kinds of ridiculous thrillers. Like The Net, a 1995 Sandra Bullock flick released by Sony Pictures. Well, you have been virus, Mr. DePina, and a not-so-very-nice one. You are the best.

I knew I could count on you. So what should we do? Well, don't think about hitting the escape key on any of your systems for a while. One keystroke will wipe out your whole system. And this wasn't the early 2000s, a time when hackers were seen by many as thrill-seeking brats.

You know, like in the social network, released by, you guessed it, Sony Pictures. Unfortunately, Harvard doesn't keep a public centralized Facebook, so I'm going to have to get all the images from the individual houses that people are in. Let the hacking begin. By the 2010s, hackers had bigger targets and bigger goals. Companies like Google, Target, and Adobe had all been subject to high-profile data raids.

And the people carrying out these attacks were going after the good stuff. Credit card numbers, source codes, passwords. In fact, one of the decade's most infamous attacks had involved Sony's own PlayStation network. In 2011, hackers stole information for nearly 80 million PlayStation accounts, a huge embarrassment for Sony, one that cost the company nearly $200 million.

So on that Monday in November 2014, when the executives at Sony Pictures realized they were under attack, they knew right away they needed help. Here's Michael Linton at that Vanity Fair conference again. When one of these things happen, it's not like you can pick up the phone and call the local police department. Instead, Sony called the FBI. The hack was no longer just an annoying tech hiccup. It was now a matter of national security. I remember a surreal experience. That's John Carlin. In 2014, he was the Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the Department of Justice. As part of his job, John attended morning meetings at FBI headquarters.

That's where he and other top intelligence officials, including FBI Director James Comey, would talk about the most relevant threats facing the country. Every morning, we would go through the threat matrix or the threat book of what threats were of greatest relevance. There were strategic threats, and then there were tactical threats that the intelligence community was monitoring. One day, not long after the Sony hack was discovered, John and his colleagues found themselves huddled around a laptop,

watching a scene from the interview. I remember, I think Director Comey was not a fan. At the time, John oversaw hundreds of employees at the DOJ, where cyber attacks against American corporations had become a top priority. Earlier that year, the Bureau indicted five Chinese hackers for attacking companies like United States Steel Corporation and Westinghouse Electric. These hackers weren't doing it to show off or to make some quick cash. This was high-end espionage.

They made off with 700,000 pages of emails from one corporation alone, and then turned around and gave that info to Chinese-owned companies. The FBI believed more American businesses were in danger of foreign cyber attacks. So it had begun reaching out to corporate leaders, hoping to make them aware of potential threats. The FBI had even gamed out various cyber attack scenarios. We had done war games or tabletops around what it might look like if a rogue nuclear-armed nation

decided to attack the United States through cyber means, and we predicted attacks on the electric grid, water supply, no one ever thought that the first major destructive attack of its kind would be about a Seth Rogen comedy. John would eventually head to the White House to brief Obama about the hack and about the interview. It is the only time in my career I've had to go brief the president in the situation room and start with the plot synopsis. We didn't show him a clip. It was just a plot synopsis. But even so, if you've seen the movie, it's not an easy movie to summarize

and explain what are we all doing here? How did this possibly lead to a national security incident? Back in L. LA, the Sony employees who'd been shut out of their computers were equally baffled. Were they really under attack? And just how serious was that skeleton warning? Those questions were on everyone's minds, especially after the deadline of 11 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time came and went. But it soon became clear that whoever hacked Sony was really pissed off at the studio, and at Pascal and Linton. Within 24 hours

of the attack, a handful of Twitter accounts posted a weird illustration of the two executives. It portrayed Pascal and Linton as suffering in some kind of gnarly wasteland, and described them as criminals who will quote, surely go to hell. That anger, and that fixation on Pascal Linton, led some Sony employees to initially suspect the attack was an inside job. After all, the studio had recently laid off more than 200 workers. And right after the hack was discovered, somebody claiming affiliation with the hackers contacted the news website The Verge.

They claimed that Guardians of Peace had gotten help from within. Sony doesn't lock their doors physically, so we worked with other staff with similar interests to get in. I'm sorry I can't say more. Safety for our team is important. We just didn't know, is it a disgruntled employee?

Those sort of rumors were going around. That's Andre Caracco again. People were a little freaked out, and so I sort of had to calm the waters and make sure everyone, you know, was sort of standing by until we knew more. There was

a bit of camaraderie going on, sort of like, what's happening here? And people are just trying to figure out what to do with themselves. In the early moments of the hack, that was the challenge for many Sony employees, to find a way to keep on working, without computers, without email, and without any idea of when things would be back to normal.

It's like nothing existed before we walked in that day. Literally nothing. That's Marisa McGrath-Liston again. She'd expected to spend that last week of November getting ready for Sony's big remake of the musical Annie, starring Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx, and produced by Will Smith and Jay-Z. It was a big movie for us. This is big creatives, big talent, high-budget movie.

There's a lot at stake here. Sony had high hopes for Annie, and Marisa had helped put together a multi-city press tour. There'd be an Annie screening at the White House, a lavish New York City premiere, and a junket with more than 50 out-of-town journalists. All of it was just a few weeks away, and all of Marisa's planning was suddenly gone.

You have people wanting their schedules, and you have, you know, things that seem so maybe not important in the scheme of things, but there is cars and hair and makeup and film clips. You're getting emails like, does Jamie Foxx have an aisle or a window? Yeah, that's right. That's right. And I'm like, well, I don't know. Can you send us back his schedule? Like, can you send us back everything? So Marisa began using her personal email account. In fact, she still has the first message she sent the day the hack was discovered. My email was, hey, Stephanie, you know, something's wrong with our emails and our phones. Can we move our conference call to tomorrow when everything's back up and running? So that was the first one. We thought it was going to be a couple of days and we're going to come back from Thanksgiving and, you know, things are going's back up and running. So that was the first one.

We thought it was going to be a couple days and we're going to come back from Thanksgiving and, you know, things are going to be up and running. In the meantime, Sony's employees would have to stay off the network. They communicated using Gmail or Google Docs and huddled around hotspots. On the lot, security guards used pen and paper to check employees in because they couldn't scan badges. The company even used an old machine to cut physical paychecks. And those weren't the only workarounds. There were a couple of the servers that our BlackBerrys were on where you could actually get your Sony emails. So if you had a BlackBerry and your server was working, you were able to work off your BlackBerry So you still have a Blackberry in 2014?

100% No, no shame, no shade. Keep in mind, in those first few days, nothing was leaking to the public. The hack was still seen by many inside the company as a tech issue, a hugely annoying tech issue, but one that seemed survivable. And so as the Thanksgiving holiday began, most Sony employees headed home for the long weekend, hoping everything would soon return to normal.

That never happened. Instead, many Sony executives spent their holiday meals dealing with the latest bit of bad news. The leaks had begun. At some point on Thanksgiving Day, nearly a half dozen illegally distributed Sony movies were discovered online. That included Brad Pitt's World War II drama, Fury, which was still playing in theaters. If you think it can't get worse, it can, and it will. Over the next several days, Fury would be downloaded more than a million times.

The other stolen Sony films were still weeks or even months from release, including Annie. The studio had spent a reported $65 million on the musical and tens of millions more on marketing. And now, anyone who wanted to watch Annie could just download it for free. For us working on movies, it was like blasphemous. That's Michael Fisk again. You're like, oh shit. Yeah. Because you think like,

okay, now, once it's on the web, you know, it's like people are just like, it's like guacamole playing with piracy. And then you just think, okay, now those markets

that we're still trying to release it, it hurts them because they're going to, there's fewer people that are going to go to the theater to watch it. That was devastating. That's Andre Caraco, who'd planned to spend the holiday relaxing with his mom, who was in town from Mexico. She was curious to know what was going

on as well, and I had no real answers at the time, but she saw me furiously texting and calling my colleagues and direct reports throughout you know, throughout the weekend. So it was sort of a lost holiday, that's for sure. Then, things somehow got even worse. The day after Thanksgiving, a statement aimed at Sony appeared on a website controlled by North Korea. The message wasn't about the hack. It was about the hack.

It was about the interview. In a strange bit of timing, a new trailer for the film had debuted the same day as the Sony shutdown. Nice tank! Is that real? It was a gift to my grandfather from Stalin. In my country, it's pronounced Stallone. According to the statement on the North Korea site,

the interview wasn't just, quote, a shabby movie. It was, in their words, an evil act of provocation. And the filmmakers, it claimed, must be, quote, subject to our stern punishment. Considering the hack had started just a few days earlier, the timing of the statement was pretty interesting. And its dramatic appearance suggested the unthinkable. Namely,

that the attack on Sony had been carried out by North Korea. And all because of the interview. But while that news may have been a shock to many inside Sony, and many outside Sony too,

the Kim Jong-un regime had been one of the FBI's prime suspects since the hack was discovered. Here's John Carlin again. The signs that it could be North Korea and the likelihood came very, very quickly. That certainty

and that speediness was thanks in part to criminal profilers at the FBI. The kind of people you see in movies chasing serial killers. For the Sony hack, those profilers studied the code used to infect the company's computers. What they would look for are, what are clues as to the state of mind of the killer that you can determine? Because they did things that were not necessary to do the killing.

So they took extra steps. Every extra step that they take is a clue as to who they may be and how they're thinking. And so that's how they were describing what they did here in cyber as well. And the hackers had given the profilers plenty of clues to work with. They were all right there in the code. Sometimes as obvious a clue is they'll be an instance in the coding where they do a note to themselves and it'll be in the relevant language. So it was a combination of what they were seeing that might be extraneous to the code itself, but also how they were sending their threat messages, how they were worded, what the images that they were putting on people's screens. Meanwhile, as the FBI worked on linking

the attack to North Korea, the hack had taken yet another unexpected turn for Sony employees. And the media was all over this latest twist. Then yesterday morning, a reporter at Fusion got an email from an anonymous source with a link to thousands of internal Sony documents. This is an MSNBC report from December 2nd, 2014. Just one of several news pieces about the hack that hit the air after Thanksgiving. Including one spreadsheet containing the salaries of more than 6,000 Sony Pictures employees, including top executives. And another one listing the names, birthdates, and social security numbers of over 3,000 employees, also including top execs.

For Sony employees, the size and scope of the hack was becoming clear. Here's Michael Fisk again. I liken it to when it's like someone going into your house and they're stealing the jewelry and they take off the plasma TV and all the electronic equipment and they're walking out with it all. And it's not that they just not only took that, but they kind of look back and like took a grenade and just flung it into the house and just created havoc. And there was plenty more havoc to come. The hacked files had begun to spread. And as journalists and online spectators began sorting through all that stolen data, they discovered more than salaries and social security numbers. They found employee passwords

and health records, contracts and performance reviews, even passports belonging to big-name stars. Holy shit, had North Korea just docked Sony? Like the entire company? And if so, who knew what other information could be out there? In the next episode of The Hollywood Hack, the worst fears of many at Sony, including Amy Pascal, come true. But nagging in the back of my mind, and I kept calling, going, they don't have our emails, right? Tell me they don't have our

emails. The Hollywood Hack was reported and written by me, Brian Raftery. The executive producers of this podcast are Juliet Littman and Sean Fennessy. Story editing by Amanda Dobbins. The show was produced by me, Devin Baraldi, and Vikram Patel.

Fact-checking by Dan Comer. Copy editing by Jack McCluskey. Sound design by Devin Rinaldo. Mixing and mastering by Scott Somerville. The music you hear in this series is from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Art direction and illustration by David Shoemaker. Thanks for listening.