It’s an all-round bad day at the office for the staff at Sony Pictures who arrived at work yesterday to find that the company’s internal systems had been compromised by a hacker group known as #GOP. Computers in the Sony Pictures office in New York, as well as other Sony locations around the world, were showing a static screen with the image of a skeleton, a message from the hackers and several URLs leading to a ZIP file that the group claimed would contain documents stolen from Sony Pictures’ servers.

The Next Web reports that a source had told them that “a single server was compromised and the attack was spread from there.” and that employees were “all going to work from home.” because they “Can’t even get on the internet.”

The documents, which are being worked through in a Reddit thread, seem to validate the hacker’s claims and are said to contain information from the mundane all the way through to sensitive information like earnings and sales forecasts, ID documents for actors that have worked for Sony Pictures in the past as well as dozens of files containing passwords. The files in the list also seem to be rather recent, with several of them referring to the current and coming financial year for Sony Pictures which lends to the theory that the information was taken recently.

Several Twitter accounts belonging to Sony Pictures movie titles were also compromised in the attack with a similar message being tweeted, although those seem to be mostly back under the control of Sony. Business 2 Community managed to grab several screenshots of the Twitter accounts which have since been taken down.

Sony have issued a press statement saying that they “are investigating an IT matter,” although that seems to be a rather mild understatement considering the current situation.

[Source – The Verge, Image – imgur]