Remember the whole Sony Pictures hack that took place nearly a year ago which was supposedly due to North Korea being pissed about The Interview? Well it seems like Sony is finally able to put things to rest by compensating employees with an $8 million fund.

 Sony agreed to pay current and former staff up to $10,000 (£7,000) each to cover costs related to identity theft.

The settlement agreement calls for a $4.5m (£2.9m) fund to reimburse the complainants, and up to $3.5m (£2.3m) for legal fees. In addition, Sony would provide identity protection to former employees for two years. 

Something still doesn’t feel right about this.

It’s easy to go down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole when it comes to the Sony Pictures hack. For those unfamiliar with the incident, in late November 2014, Sony Pictures became the victim of a massive cyber attack which saw not only thousands of emails and internal documents leak (with some embarrassing exchanged which would lead to Sony’s co-chair Amy Pascal to step down), but also saw 5 films make their way to the web prior to their release.

North Korea would eventually be named the culprit behind the hack which even saw the White House get involved but I’m still not convinced. Is North Korea really that bored that they’d be offended by a comedy movie and in turn be motivated enough to hack a US corporation and if so, what did they really gain from it?

Other theories of disgruntled employees have been tossed around and though unproven, seem far more likely to me. How else would somebody extract terabyte after terabyte of data from there without anybody noticing? Even if Sony Pictures’ security system wasn’t the best in the business, there is no way that much data would slowly be extracted without an alarm sounding off. More to that point is that taking that much data would take a really long time.

Either way for Sony, settling with employees for $8 million is the least of their worries. Instead the whole debacle lead to a lot of dirt coming to the surface from private email exchanges which has far more long term ramifications when it comes to dealings with the studio.

Discuss:

Do you think North Korea was behind it?

[Via BBC]