Sony Hackers Might Have Planted a Time Bomb Months Ago

We are now starting to get further in depth details on how the massive hack against Sony Pictures’ network may have taken place.

According to Bloomberg’s interview with a security analyst at Trend Micro, “the hackers have probably been working inside Sony’s systems for months.”  Trend Micro is a security software company that claims to have copies of the malware used to infect Sony’s computers.

Trend Micro says, “that the particular type of software used to hack into Sony’s network wasn’t a specialist virus, instead it was widely available on the black market and was modified to specifically target Sony.”

It’s been stated that the software used against Sony was old and crude in terms of it’s complexity, and available online instead of something that was custom-built.   With this information one might assume that the hack was the work of a gang of “hactivists” instead of a state-sponsored attack.  But specialist warn that was probably the intent of the hacker.

Business Insider conducted it’s own interview with a security specialist that explained to them “that most hackers use and escalating series of attacks that gradually increase in size, complexity and cost. It could be that hackers had much bigger pieces of software they could have used, but Sony’s security was so poor that they didn’t have to.”

What does this mean?  Mostly likely, that hackers used their intimate knowledge of Sony’s computer system to plan an detailed “Time Bomb.”  Masayoshi Someya, a security “evangelist” at Trend Micro, says “that hackers triggered the malware, which started a 10-minute countdown. As the minutes counted down, the virus disabled security software, and accessed hard drives, servers and connected computer networks. And when the time was up, a sinister message appeared on company screens.”