the United States was using a “gangster filmmaker” to undermine the North Korean leadership. Seth Rogen joked on Twitter, “People don’t usually wanna kill me for one of my movies until after they’ve paid 12 bucks for it.” A little over a week after the hack, Wired magazine assessed it was “outlandish” to think that North Korea would be behind the Sony cyberattack. Among other reasons, Wired argued that “nation-state attacks don’t usually announce themselves with a showy image of a blazing skeleton posted to infected machines or use a catchy nom-de-hack like Guardians of Peace to identify themselves.”
Despite the North’s formidable nuclear and ballistic missile programs, it is all too easy to underestimate the small country. Alexandra Alter of The New York Times noted that “North Korea is a long-running punch line in American pop culture.” In the movie Team America: World Police, Kim Jong Il turns into a cockroach. On the television show 30 Rock, Margaret Cho plays the cheese-loving, cognac-swilling leader Kim Jong Il, and late-night talk and variety shows like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show have gotten laughs with endless Kim jokes. The Korea historian Charles Armstrong told Alter, “North Korea embodies all the stereotypes of imagery from the Cold War, but in an absurd way, so we can poke fun at it in a way that we couldn’t poke fun at the Soviet Union or Communist China….We don’t take North Korea seriously enough.” Michael Lynton, the chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment, said, “At that point in time, Kim Jong-un was relatively new in the job, and I don’t think it was clear yet how he was different from his father….Nobody ever mentioned anything about their cyber capabilities.” After all, wasn’t North Korea an isolated, backward country? How could they possibly have the technical prowess and the nerve to attack and threaten political coercion against a major movie studio?
The extent of the damage quickly became clear. An employee said, “It was like a bomb went off….We looked around. We were still alive. So we started doing triage.” An ex-employee remembered, “Everything was so completely destroyed. It was surreal. Everything was down.” It wasn’t just that the Sony employees had to handwrite everything, couldn’t get paid on schedule, and had to work longer hours to complete tasks that normally took much less time. The Sony staff thought they could manage those problems.
But the hack did more than destroy the data of Sony Pictures Entertainment: Confidential information, including salary lists, nearly fifty thousand Social Security numbers, and five unreleased films, was dumped onto public file-sharing sites. The cyberattack exposed the movie industry’s dirty laundry, sending a “ripple of dread across Hollywood to Washington.” The hackers released massive amounts of emails and other documents revealing gossip, celebrities’ online aliases, and battles about projects and actors, setting off a feeding frenzy by media hungry for salacious information about Hollywood stars, including Angelina Jolie, Natalie Portman, and Tom Hanks. But even the rank and file at Sony were hurt: Their identities were stolen, details about their medical procedures were exposed, and cybercriminals drained their personal bank accounts.
When the FBI investigated, a spokesman for the National Defense Commission—which at that time was North Korea’s highest governing organization—denied their involvement in or knowledge of the hack, but gloated that the attack “might be a righteous deed of the supporters and sympathizers” of the regime. The NDC statement also said The Interview was a “film abetting a terrorist act while hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership” of North Korea. A little over a week later, the Guardians of Peace threatened 9/11-type attacks if Sony went ahead and released the film, warning in ungrammatical English, “We will clearly show it to you at the very time and places The Interview be shown, including the premiere, how bitter fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to….The world will be full of fear….Remember the 11th of September 2001.”
No one could have anticipated that a raunchy bro-com movie could have led to a national security crisis. Sony and the multiplex operators—and the malls that housed them—took the threats of terrorism seriously. The film debuted in Los Angeles on December 11, but Sony canceled the wide release on December 17, and then reversed its decision two days later. But the major theater chains refused to show it over the holidays, fearful of another event like the 2012 massacre in Aurora, Colorado, in which a gunman murdered twelve people and injured