Ep. 4: The Sony Playbook

It's one of the biggest crypto-highs today.

“The water cry virus crippled computer systems in at least 150 companies and countries last week.”

And inside the thieves stole $81 million from the Bangladesh banks account with the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Looking back now, the warning signs feel obvious. But at the time, almost nobody saw them. Probably because the first North Korean cyber attack to really lodge itself in the American Consciousness was disguised as a Hollywood scandal. Sony's computer network was hacked in what may be a blackmail attempt. The source says the hack is being linked to a group called Guardians of Peace, and that the incident began when a picture of a skull appeared on the company computer screen.

It was greeted by wallpaper of a skeleton and a message warning the hacking was just beginning. The Asalance called themselves the Guardians of Peace, but that was just a distraction from the real Asalance. North Korea.

“"Some Sony pictures employees are concerned after receiving a rambling email yesterday written in Broken English.”

It asked them to sign a statement cutting ties with Sony.

If you don't, the email said not only you, but your family will be in danger." The strange thing about the Sony hack is that almost everyone remembers it, but almost nobody remembers it for what it actually was. One of the most destructive and costly cyber attacks ever to hit American soil, an act of censorship, and a successful one. In case you were living under a rock between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2014, Sony pictures was hacked, badly over a movie. "Look at this. Kim Jong-un wants to do an interview with Dave Skylarke. He's a fan. Look at him. If that ain't a real story. What is?"

"Okay, let's do it. I'm going in, I'm going in, I'm going in!" The attack was in retaliation for the interview. A Seth Rogen James Franco's donor comedy about journalist who landed interview with Kim Jong-un, and get approached by the CIA. The CIA would love it if you could take him out. "Mmm? Take him out."

"Like for drinks, like to dinner at the town?" "No, uh, take him out." At the time, it felt like a bizarre collision of Hollywood, cyber, geopolitics, but revisiting the Sony hack now, more than a decade later, it lands differently, like the opening sequence of something much bigger. All Americans were caught up in celebrity emails. North Korea was quietly building a playbook.

One that would be picked up and co-opted by nation seats and cyber criminals for years to come. And had we been paying closer attention, we might have seen that Sony was a preview of what would come. That North Korea was evolving into a formidable cyber aggressor, one that didn't just launch crippling attacks, but would successfully steal millions, then billions of dollars in cryptocurrency, and eventually, capable of silently infiltrating American companies at scale.

We might have seen that the caricature we all clung to was keeping us one step behind. The US intelligence community constantly underestimates what the North Koreans are capable of doing, given all the constraints that they have. That's Jenny Town, the director of 38 North. A think-tink focused exclusively on North Korea.

And what the North Koreans improvement over the years is never underestimates North Korea.

Once they've decided to do something, they will figure out a way to do it, and it isn't necessarily the most high tech solution. It's not necessarily the most sophisticated solution, but it is definitely capitalizing what they do have and maximizing its impact over time, just out of sheer will and perseverance. I'm Nicole Crowleroth, and this is to catch a thief.

“If you ask the Americans what they actually remember about that attack,”

it's probably not the fact that North Korea reduced Sony to digital rubble. It's most likely the emails. Everybody remembers the emails. Now, officially below... Oh, I mean bold. Link to emails between two major Hollywood power players now reveal racist jokes against President Obama,

Kevin Hart being called a greedy hoard and Angelina Jolie called us.

He asked that the revelation he had a slave owning ancestor be omitted from the PBS documentary finding your roots.

“It wasn't just emails. The dumped millions of dollars worth of stolen IP,”

unreleased films, and personnel records, social security numbers, and salaries that revealed Hollywood's Lering pay gap. Yeah, and we've got you with Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams as well being paid less than their co-stars.

17 top owners, who are over a million dollars, we understand that have been leaked.

Two, only two aren't white, and only one is a female. Very quickly, the hack stopped being treated as a national security event and it became content. The leaks were endless. WikiLeaks turned them into a searchable archive. It was a complete media spectacle, and it wasn't just page six or entertainment tonight or cable news. These leaks were covered by the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post.

They trended for weeks on Twitter, and inevitably became late night television fodder. And doing what it does best. Saturday night live took on the Sony's scandal. The stick gets helped from actor Mike Myers, reprising his doctor-evil character from the

“Austin Powers trilogy. What is your take on on Sony pulling the movie the interview?”

Are we going to send some sort of a stern message to Kim Jong-un that he's going to understand?

Sony emails. Things they never wanted you to see. Nicholas Cage said the script is terrible,

and he's in. We've run out of comic books, how about movies based on phone books? My name is Dan Sterling, and I am the screenwriter of the movie, the interview. Also, the story creator, although I share story creation credits with Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogan. The initial concept for the interview actually had nothing to do with North Korea. Dan Sterling had been developing a rom-com with Seth Rogan. When Rogan and Evan Goldberg approached

Dan with an idea. They said, "We have this crazy idea." And that idea was like, "What if Dan

“rather got Osama bin Laden in a room to interview him? Should Dan rather kill him?" And this was”

before Osama bin Laden was killed and what should he do? And so that's all it was. So I went out

for drinks with my friend Josh Christ, and he was like, "It has to be the North Koreans." I was like, "Oh, that's a brilliant idea." He's like, "Yeah." These are the people who nobody's talking about. The whole world would be on our side for this one. What I thought was the least controversial thing in the world that Kim Jong-un is an asshole. I didn't want to attack or satirize starving, misinformed North Korean people. But the North Korean government and the people

around Kim Jong-un seemed worthy of epic satire and Boyle boy did we commit to them. Initially they didn't even plan to call the movie's dictator Kim Jong-un, but then came a faithful conversation with the Sony executive. I was sitting in a trailer on the Sony lot in pre-production with Seth and Evan. And one of the executives, this wonderful woman, or won't name her name, she said, "Listen, what if just as an experiment, what if you went through and you changed

at all the fake names and you made him Kim Jong-un?" And I was like, "Oh, I love that. That's super edgy." This is a thousand times funnier and better and more rock and roll. So they go for it. They tweak the script and they start filming. But as the near-production, Sony got checks the plot with defense experts at the Rand Corporation. Rand tells them, this is a bad idea. This is going to have set them very much and just use fake names. That's

all we're asking. But Seth and Evan said, "No, it's too far. We've gone too far. We're going to do it." Where executives dug in their heels, though, was the films over the top bludgeoning of Kim Jong-un. Rand told Sony, this was a really bad idea. You're going to have to trim back some of these death scenes and blah, blah, blah. I just kind of stayed out of it. The version of it, they have now more than suffices. I mean, they have this very slow acoustic, downbeat score of Katy Petty's

firework going to it. And just as Kim Jong-un's face is being ripped from skin through muscle

I certainly don't remember them saying, "Oh, it's going to be a hack where it shuts down

“everything Sony owns. They're going to have to lose a billion dollars worth of computing and”

infrastructure. None of that was clear to me at all." Hacks shut down the company's entire computer system and according to L.A. Times, employees were reduced to using old-fashioned pet and paper to complete assignments and God forbid taking calls on landline telephones. We even fired up our fax machine when person told the paper.

I've never seen what we were starting to see unfold in 2014 at Sony.

That's Kevin Mandia, who's responded to more cyber as Hacks than anyone in the private sector. It was his firm Mandian, but Sony called into investigate their attack. So, did you ever watch the movie? I loved the movie. How do you not? You almost feel a moral obligation to watch it. And I genuinely went into it with a low bar and I was pleasantly laughing a lot. Can you tell us why it was so unprecedented? I call it a red lever event. You're off the grid,

“or it's just total destruction. Let's delete everything and post a message. Meaning, phones may”

not work, gate may not come up, employees generally go outside to get on the phone network because that's the network working now. People are trying to figure out what's the impact

of this destructive attack and what can we do as a business? So, pretty quickly, Mandian was

able to map the attack back to North Korea. The malware-shared digital infrastructure. IP addresses, tooling, and tactics with the previous DPRK SBNage operation they tracked. It also overlapped with a little notice North Korean attack against South Korea year earlier. It's called Dark Soul. So, not SAU, as it means South Korean capital. In March of 2013 and June of 2013, there was an attack on South Korean companies, agencies with government. And it's because

part of Seoul went dark. The banks, some of the media companies, were knocked off the air. People couldn't get money out of their ATMs. It was incredibly disruptive. North Korean hackers wiped hard drives at major South Korean banks and broadcasters. There were other more subjective signals, too. Here's John Holk Quest, Chief Analyst of Google's Threat Intelligence Group. They'd used this imagery that had

a skeleton. It was really interesting because in the dark soul incident, they'd also used the same very similar like skeleton imagery. And they called themselves Guardians of Peace, but they had actually previously called themselves the Gods of Possils. And while Mandian had no doubts, this was North Korea, the sophistication of it still caught them off guard. This is Marshall Heilman, the CEO of Detechs, a security firm. But back then, he led Mandian's response to

the Sony attack. They had some pretty complex malware that was very effective. And when you have

those second weapons and you understand how to deploy them properly, that's a well-willed well-trained

team of people. At that point, how aware were you of North Korea cyber capabilities? You know,

“how big of a threat did you consider North Korea to be?”

Yeah, honestly, it wasn't even on my radar. That'd be fair. I was not an intelligence analyst. And so I feel like if I was an intelligence analyst, it probably would have been more of my radar. But given that I was, as I loved saying, incident response junkie, I just went from one incident to the next and next, just trying to solve all the crime that it possibly could. And so for me, North Korea, it came a bit out of nowhere.

Like, we were just totally wrong in our Setsman's North Korea. That last voice was Steve Stone, who also worked on the Sony Aftermath for Mandian. Unlike Marshall, Steve had spent time in the intelligence community. It really forced us to confront a lot of the incorrect intelligence assessments we had about this threat group. We were just wrong in many, many ways. And tackling all of that in the middle of a

really intense intrusion. That's just a lot. It was pure coincidence that Steve was an LA that Thanksgiving. At the terminal at LAX, he gets a call from a senior exec at Sony. I knew this person. This person knew me. We had both worked in the government together. And the question was, no joke is this North Korea. The main point I was conveying was, this is North Korea. We are confident. And here is why. We've seen different pieces before.

We're not taking someone's word. We're not reading a report. We're looking at the forensics. We're looking at the data that we have collected and stored and curated from other intrusions. And we're focused on the organic data the incident responders are pulling out of Sony directly. What made this call particularly frustrating was the fact that Mandian wasn't the only firm to come on site. Sony had also called in consultants from the big four. We didn't have the same forensic

of a disgruntled insider. There were let's call them competing hypotheses to be generous. The other organizations that are arguing a different outcome, they just don't have access to the data. So whatever they're saying, they do not have the core strength that we do, which is we are looking at the ones and zeros. If you're not looking at that, I don't know why anybody would

“have an opinion on what happened because they actually have no idea. I think at the end of the day”

that was their opinion, they shouldn't sad that this was actually North Korea. Steven Marshall, both said they rolled their eyes, did one of these okay, whatever you say, took their computers

and basically switched war rooms. Talk to me about what that was like for you just on a human level.

It's frustrating. When you look at something and you believe that you've got a typical proof that I think is what you say it is. In this particular case, there was North Korea. And you have all these other people who don't have access to the same data. They're not part of the investigation. They're just talking on the sides if you will. It becomes very frustrating because you spend almost as much time defending your work as you do actually doing the work.

“Far beyond Sony's war room, officials in Washington had also reached the same conclusion.”

And so for years, we work aimed in this space. What will it look like if a rogue nuclear arm nation decides to attack the United States through cybermeans? Here's John Carlin. He ran point on national security matters at the Justice Department at the time. And we did a lot of different scenarios. We did electrical grid and water grid and attacks against missile systems and our overall ability to communicate so telecom. We all got a wrong, right, and no one

anticipated that the first time that that would happen would be over a movie about

pot smoking journalists with Seth Rogan in it. The thing that sticks to me is not a forensic point or IT point. It was really getting a sense of the fear that employees had, you know,

“it's worked that day. It was skull and crossbone of a foreign power that's nuclear armed.”

It was John Carlin's job to brief the president, the FBI director and the attorney general. We had these morning threat briefings with the attorney general, the director of the FBI inside the Syracur secure space at FBI headquarters. And the threats of the day could include a war terrorism threats, most significant cyber threats, criminal threats. And we had a

morning where we were learning about an attack against Sony that had to do with a movie

about a bunch of pot smoking journalists called the interview. Not the normal fodder for that morning briefing and the director of the FBI at the time brought an agent who had a clip of the interview, which they showed us in the Syracur, where you normally you're seeing, and fraired satellite photographs would be the type of thing that you're seeing in that morning briefing, and instead we're seeing a movie clip about this movie that had

agitated the head of North Korea. There was notable disbelief in the room that we were seeing that preview. Even while here it's the only time my career I have had to brief the president of the United States in the situation room around national security incidents. And it's the only time that I had to start the briefing here to the assembled national security secretaries with a plot in office. So inside the intelligence community, we had to be done what was going on.

We understood. That was Rob Joyce, who was running NSA's hacking division T-A-O at the time. And while he has to be circumspect on the classified intelligence, they had definitively pointing to the DPRK, he confirmed that the initial public assessments were right on target. After the Sony attack, even the cybersecurity community focused in on North Korea, they got it right. If you watched the Twitter community that I follow, everybody was talking about the fact that Sony

was a North Korean job. It was really funny though after the White House came out with attribution, and the FBI named them, then all the conspiracy theories popped out and people had all sorts of reasons why it wasn't the North Koreans, which really just surprised me because the wisdom of crowds was already there. And the fact that the government set it pulled everybody into a whole different region. From the moment the White House and FBI formally came out and pinned this on North Korea,

and for the National Security Council. It was actually Andrew who wrote the FBI's attribution statement.

“As you might imagine, there was not a insignificant amount of debate about doing that.”

For all kinds of reasons, are we going to create more risks to Sony? The threats that were being made around fiscal violence and moviegoers, if we do this, is there going to be corresponding risk to the American population? There are a whole lot of debates for understandable reason,

but the reality is that we really wouldn't hold back in almost any other domain and calling out

a nation's date for malicious activity against the American population. We shouldn't do that here. Now, if there's questions of uncertainty about attribution or anything, look, that's a different conversation, but if you've got it dead to write, then you know it, come out and say it. As you can imagine, lots of agencies have lots of opinions on what should be said.

“We were getting an input from the intelligence community. We were getting language from the state”

department. We were getting language from DOJ and the FBI to sort of aggregate into one cohesive

document that ultimately the FBI would issue. And your job is to kind of try and pull them all together

in a cohesive narrative, and I'm sitting there, like, blurry eye, having gotten enough sleep, typing it out, and there was this moment where it's like, I'm done, and I'm sending this. We have got some breaking news out of Washington. The FBI is now officially accusing North Korea of being behind the Sony Hack Attack. The FBI statement was definitive. The North Korean government is responsible for the cyber attack on Sony. The FBI announced today that, and we can confirm

that North Korea engaged in this attack. I mean, it says something interesting about North Korea

that they decided to have the state mount on all out assault on a movie studio because of

a satirical movement. If you thought the FBI and the president of the United States coming on national television to pin this on North Korea would dwell the conspiracy theories, you'd be wrong. For reasons that probably deserve their own podcast, Iraq, WMDs, Snowden, collapsing institutional trust, many people simply refuse to take the government's word on this one. And it wasn't just internet conspiracy theorists. Here's John Holkwist again. It was unprecedented for the FBI

to go out and say, here's all little reasons why, like, these solid reasons why we can connect this stuff, right? But there was a startup at the time that had this entirely counter theory on what was going on. They were on the news. And you could imagine from those of us who did this for a living, it was infuriating to see that alternate reality being put up on a pedestal and broadcast out to the world. It became a debate on every major news station, even PBS news hour.

Mark Rogers, let's have a problem with that. The biggest problem with this is a lot of this information is based on evidence that isn't accessible to a lot of folks. There are hints, however, that there may be things like signals, intelligence, and other information that they can't disclose for national security purposes. Unfortunately, without being on to exactly information, there's no way for other security experts to really validate. The forensic trail of the Sony hack,

it's mysterious, difficult to follow. Experts have lingering doubts about North Korea's ability to carry out such as a sophisticated attack. It's beyond the skill level that we've been able to observe. Maddening. I mean, Maddening. Seeing and hearing people on the news being interviewed

“or reading news articles, like, you know the emoji with the guy, what they've had exploding?”

That was me. I remember there was reports that Seth Rogan didn't even believe that they done it because he talked to some IT guy and his IT guy said it wasn't possible or something like that. As all of this debate spiraled outward, the finger pointing, the conspiracy theories, the obsession with Sony's leaked emails, something important was getting lost. The focus had shifted off the attackers and onto the victims. Hi, I'm Michael Linton. I'm the former chief executive of Sony

and in this conspiracy theory that actually this was not happening as the result of a North Korean hack,

but rather that there was a disgruntled employee that might have done it, that nobody actually chose to look at the bigger issue. In this case, hackers weren't content just trying to stop the interview from coming out. They were trying to bleed Sony executives dry. It was very complicated to try and talk to the employees at Sony who understandably had not really signed up for something like this. The majority of people there were there to make commercial television and film. They were

not trying to stand up for putting movies out that foreign hostile powers didn't want to have out and so to encourage people to continue to come to work and continue to participate was really complicated. It was complicated and unpleasant to see the way that the media treated my partner Amy Pascal. It was unpleasant and complicated to see how my personally emails were put out all over the place. Amy Pascal, who co-chared Sony pictures of Michael Linton at the time, took the

brand of the leaks. They included her candid assessments of everyone from A-list actors like Lee in order to caprio to racially insensitive jokes about President Obama's imagined film preferences. All of which was covered at Nasium in the tabloid media and even my own paper The New York Times.

“Here's Kevin Mandia. I think no one deserves to have their email hacked and leaked. I don't”

care who they are going through something like that. It's just a massively and grossly unfair thing. And in 2014 it was way more common to co-mingle your private and public data together than other industries that are regulated. And so I just think to see that happen to people. And by the way, I've lived through it myself as a victim of knowing some emails were compromised. You don't

know the fallout. And what's amazing to me in a negative way is how fast the press can go through

50,000 emails and find the one that will hang you. The one that will crucify. The one that will take your career and change it. That is a horrible thing to witness. And to me, I think adversaries take advantage of that. Last in the back and forth over the emails was the fact that the hackers were escalating threatening to launch terror attacks against any movie theater that showed the film.

“Here's John Carlin again. The other part that I think gets forgotten here is that they also were”

threatening to bomb movie theaters that distributed the film at a time when we were seeing terrorist

attacks and we were still living at a time closer to number 11. And we were seeing this first of

another type of terrorist attacks. So people took that threat very seriously. And I think that added to that climate of initial fear. "There's alert. Get this now. The Sony hackers threatening violence in America. The new hackers are now threatening to do more damage. They call this latest online warning. Just the beginning of a Christmas gift, saying quote, "Whatever comes in the coming days is called by the greed of Sony Pictures Entertainment."

Dan Sterling, the interview screenwriter, said the threat of violence was palpable. What I remember is that at a certain point they attached body guards to Seth and Evan and to Diana and to Randall, these were the main actors. They had three body guards a piece, a body guard for themselves, their spouses, and then one for just outside their homes. And I thought, "Should I have a body guard?" And so I asked my lawyer if he could look into this.

So Sony set him up with some Israeli lawyer. And I'm only saying Israeli because I'm going to do the accents so badly. I said, "Hi, I was just wondering, should I not have a body guard in this situation?"

“You are the writer. Nobody cares about you. I said, "Oh, okay." Well, that's what he said.”

You're the writer. You're the intellectual. Nobody cares about the intellectual. It's like you're nothing to them. I'm like, "Okay, I got it. You're dead to them." I said, "Okay." The interview held its world premiere in LA on December 11, 2014, but it was not your normal screening. Yeah, the premiere was weird. I took as one of my guests Sarah Silverman. And she was saying, "I don't know what to do." You know, my manager saying, "Don't go.

You don't have to come." But she came. It was a real downbeat situation.

“Hackers kept upping the ante with threats against the theaters. Michael Linton assumed the theaters would stay strong.”

He'd come to Sony from Publishing, at Penguin, and seen the fallout after the imprint published Solomon Rushdo's satanic verses, Iran issued a fought-wah on Rushdo, essentially a death order, and Linton had seen how the entire publishing industry rallied to Penguin's defense. He assumed Hollywood would do the same for Sony, not so.

In truth, Sony was not the canary in the coal mine, Penguin was, because when Penguin first published

that book, the satanic verses, Peter Mayer was in charge of the company, and nobody had any experience up until that moment with what an authoritarian regime could do when they were threatening violence. And at the time, Penguin stood by the book, continued to publish the book, kept it in bookstores,

“the aftermath or the result of the threat was much more serious than what we experienced at Sony,”

because three people died. But the biggest difference was the way that the publishing industry responded as compared to the way that the movie industry responded. The publishing industry was almost, in fact, completely supportive of what Penguin was trying to do. All the various book publishers

came out in support of the company. The booksellers came out in support of the company.

The major change at the time, the Dalton and Walden continued to stock the book, despite the risk to their security. There were major ads put out in the New York Times by the industry in support of the issue, and quite the opposite was the case with Sony. There wasn't a single reach out with one possible exception by any of the studios to be supportive. And at the very end,

“when the North Koreans actually threatened the theaters themselves, they said they weren't going”

to carry the picture. So it was really a study in contrast in terms of how one creative community or media community behaved as compared to the other. Imagine if, in the middle of Iran's Vatwa against Salman Rushdie, the conversation had shifted from the threat to whether Iran was really behind it. If Pundit spent days on CNN and PBS asking, "But is this actually Iran?" That's essentially what happened after Sony.

A foreign dictatorship had just carried out a destructive act of censorship against an American movie studio. But instead of focusing on that extraordinary fact, the conversation was consumed by whether North Korea was even capable of it. That reflects to question the attribution staring us right in the face, to dismiss North Korea's incapable or too insophisticated, would become the pattern. And our adversaries learned that they didn't have to hide completely.

They just had to sew enough doubt to hijack the conversation. But what haunts me still is this. The censorship worked. Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw a major Hollywood film about Kim Jong-un? You haven't. You think that when you're standing up for free speech,

you're always going to be standing up for something like the Pentagon papers. You don't imagine

in the back of your mind that you're going to be standing up for a Seth Rogan comedy. And the truth of the matter is you don't get to choose what you're standing up for. And it actually doesn't matter ultimately, whether it's the Pentagon paper source Seth Rogan's comedy. Both have equal merit when it comes to the point of censorship. Sony wanted to stand up for this film, to stand up to censorship, but the theaters ultimately helped the final say. The interview had been slated

for Christmas Day. But after a major theater change buckled under the threats, Sony pulled the film from wide theatrical release altogether. President Obama called the decision of mistake. But within days Sony announced it had found a new venue. It would release the interview through online platforms like YouTube and select independent theaters. The theaters that showed the film got courtesy FBI sweeps. Some handed out American flags, moviegoers and Georgia spontaneously broke into

God bless America. And for this crowd in Atlanta, the experience is nothing short of patriotic. Thousands of people spent their Christmas Day taking in the movie that sparked an international incident with North Korea. Earlier this week, Sony pictures reverse course and decided to

show the film, take it sold quickly and many saw it as their patriotic duty to see it.

But at the end of the day, when you look back 12 years later, North Korea achieved most of

“its objectives. I think what bothered me the most was it worked. Like when the day was done,”

this accomplished every single goal North Korea had. I think if you could line up all the North Koreans that were involved, they would tell you it was a universal success. 100% success. I think our own assessments say that. That bothered me. I've learned a lot since that event. And I remember in many ways my worldview was very naive. The good guys win, the bad guys don't, bad guys won.

Like they definitively won. And that really bothered me. We hadn't really seen the name and shame

like that before. We really hadn't seen the we're going to make this as painful as possible kind of element before. Now we see it every day. That was Steve Stone, and he's right. The operation was so effective that less than two years later, Russia would adopt the same playbook. Here's Rob Joyce who watched this unfold in real time at the NSA. The strategic moment was the Sony breach where it wasn't just a breach. It was

reaching into an American company and kind of bleeding them in public before 2014. Russia absolutely hack networks. But leaking stolen data to shape the public narrative was not a central repeatable doctrine for them. Russia was doing classic espionage. They steal quietly, stay hidden, leaks happen occasionally through intermediaries or journalists, but not timed as influence operations. The Russian model was still steal for intelligence, not steal the publish.

“Sony, I think, gave them a template in 2014.”

Maybe North Korea didn't fully understand what they'd unleashed. Or how many Americans would run with it, but others did. Russia watched how stolen emails amplified by headlines, influencers, and algorithms can take on a life of their own. And soon, hack-and-lead operations became the norm. Tonight, as the FBI investigates, cyber security experts are blaming the hack attack on the intelligence agencies of Russian

president Vladimir Putin, a former KGB Colonel himself, who said the hackers went undetected for more than a year. There's a lot they stole that has yet to be made public.

When we first heard that Russia had hacked the DNC in 2016, it looked like classic espionage.

“Political campaigns are always primed targets in election years.”

Nations states want insight into policies, strategy, anything that might help them repair for the administration that can soon take power. And at first, the Democratic National Committee hacks seem no different. But then came the online persona, Gujifur 2.0, and the leaks. Not all at once, drip by drip, for maximum political damage. Online, the mundane became scandalous, stolen emails, opposition research, private speeches, even John Podesta's tips for risotto,

were weaponized online. And suddenly, America was living through its own version of Sony. Posing his Gujifur 2.0, the Russians offered up stolen documents to Julian Assange's WikiLeaks, and self-proclaimed dirty trickster Roger Stone. Donald Trump, tonight, seizing on a controversy, brewing for Democrats, after thousands of leaked emails, showed Democratic Party officials, possibly plotting against Bernie Sanders in his race against Hillary Clinton.

WikiLeaks releasing nearly 20,000 internal DNC emails to each pizza date, an internet rumor alleging a Clinton campaign child sex ring. Online, even innocent references to pizza, were twisted into deranged conspiracy theories about child trafficking rings, lies with no basis in reality. The pizza date conspiracy began with the Clinton WikiLeaks, and an email stolen from campaign shape John Podesta, the conspiracy theory quickly spread

to Reddit and YouTube, feeding fake online news stories, then jumping to Facebook and Twitter. And before long, those fantasies spilled into the real world as physical threats, and violence of their own. As for the adversary, Russia, once again, Americans tied themselves

I don't think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC. She's saying Russia, Russia, Russia, but I don't, maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China, it could also be lots of other people, it could also be somebody sitting on their bed that

“weighs 400 pounds, okay? What do you think of the tends trying to push the blame on Russia?”

Is there proof of that? No, and in fact, this has been proven false even in New York times that it was ridiculous. Even as cybersecurity firms and intelligence agencies and independent researchers converged around the same conclusion that Russia was behind this, the public debate drifted somewhere else entirely. The operation had done exactly what it was designed to do, not just steal information, but fracture consensus itself. As Americans turned their attention

to the 2016 election and everything that followed, Sony became something of a distant memory. Maybe we assumed it'd been contained, that Northgrade got in the message. He did our warning.

“After that attack, Obama had publicly promised the U.S. would respond in kind.”

We will respond. We will respond proportionally, and we'll respond in a place in time and matter that we choose. And then, do you see later? Something very strange happened. North Korea went dark. Well, staying with North Korea, the nation's internet connection went dark for nine hours and 31 minutes yesterday and again briefly today. And North Korean websites are back online this morning after a temporary shutdown. It's not clear who or what caused the widespread

outages, experts say it's one of the worst network failures in years. For a country of 25 million

people, North Korea's internet connection is astonishingly small. But from the outside, the timing

“of it, well, it looked like the U.S. was sending a message.”

Well, it's not known who's responsible, but the timing of the incident is interesting. It comes just weeks after a cyber attack on Sony pictures, which made it feel like a movie script for sure. North Korea's internet outage was the country and its widespread internet failure. U.S. attack in response to the Sony pictures hacking. Nobody ever officially claimed responsibility. The way it has stayed can speak use the quiet.

Those they asked never offered any confirmation. Some told me it was totally unrelated.

But it was a nice theory. The bad guys getting their come up ends, even for a brief moment. And when we didn't hear from North Korea for a year, we sort of assumed that maybe they'd learn their lesson. But in reality, North Korea wasn't done. Their Hollywood test run had gone well. And now, it was time to set their sights on something bigger, money. U.S. law enforcement is now working with Bangladesh authorities to probe one of the biggest

transnational cyber theft cases in the world. It was like, in a movie, where you have a bank fault-hice, except there's no masks, there's no hacking into the camera, there's no getaway cars,

there's just guys at keyboards. It's just amazing for a nation state to do this. This was unheard of.

That's next, on to catch a thief. Follow to catch a thief to make sure you don't miss the next episode. And if you like what you hear, rate and review the show. To catch a thief is co-produced by mean, a cool proleroth, and rubric, and partnership with pod people, with special thanks to Julia Lee. Bye.