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Matthew Champion
Dec 18, 2014
What is going on?
This week the hackers known only as the Guardians of Peace that have caused Sony Pictures so much difficulty threatened a 9/11-style terror attack if its film The Interview was shown in cinemas.
Within days the premiere of the comedy film, starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, had been cancelled, the largest five cinema chains in North America said they would not screen it, and now Sony has said it has no plans to release it in any region on any format.
So basically that's $42million (£27million) in production costs wasted.
What's the story behind the story?
Trouble first started in June when North Korea called the film - which sees two journalists played by Rogen and Franco co-opted into a CIA plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un - an "act of war". Then last month Sony fell victim to a massive hack of confidential data that saw embarrassing emails released and entire film scripts leaked.
North Korea officially denied any link to the hackers but described what they had done as a "righteous act", but the FBI now believes that Pyongyang was behind the attack, meaning the west had vastly underestimated the sophistication of the reclusive communist regime's cyber warfare capabilities.
The assertion that North Korea was behind the hack comes despite the hackers leaking a (spoiler alert!) clip of the violent death of Kim Jong-un (played by US actor Randall Park) in the film.
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