Inside job: Lizard Squad and ex-Sony employees likely aided North Korea’s hack attack

Unless you’ve been living under a (terribly remote) rock for the past month or so, you know the story by now. Seth Rogen and James Franco’s latest comedic production, about a far-fetched Kim Jong-Un assassination plot, infuriated the North Korean dictator, who ordered a cyber-hit on Sony Pictures.

The entertainment giant suffered great losses on the heels of its servers’ breakdown, as heaps of sensitive, confidential and outright embarrassing information made its illicit way online. The full impact of the hack attack on Sony’s reputation and financial status remains hard to measure, but at least the authorities are onto the perpetrators.

And the co-conspirator hints are beginning to pile up. Reports now claim the self-titled “Guardians of Peace” may have been aided and abetted by a separate notorious cybercrime ring, Lizard Squad, and disgruntled former Sony employees.

Ruining Christmas for gamers worldwide wasn’t the recently unmasked members of Lizard Squad kept busy. While they didn’t play a “large part” in Sony’s hack, they “handed over some Sony employee logins” to the brains behind the intrusion.

That’s according to an alleged administrator of the group, who was surprisingly candid and forward in a Washington Post interview. Almost too forward. Before you even think it, yes, the prestigious publication verified this “Ryan Cleary’s” affiliation with the Lizard Squad and. That doesn’t guarantee his claims are correct, however.

Cleary touched on a number of topics including the Christmas DDoS raids on Sony and Microsoft and Lizard Squad’s beef with the Tor network, which the hackers hoped to prove isn’t as safe and anonymous as people think.

He poked fun at Microsoft, which apparently put up no resistance to recent attacks, despite numerous preceding warnings. And last but not least, he confirmed his crew of cyber-criminals supplied the Guardians of Peace with “a couple” of Sony employee login credentials “for the initial hack.”

Researchers from the security firm Norse Corporation, meanwhile, have found “indicators” suggesting unhappy former Sony workers may have collaborated with mysterious pro-piracy hacktivists, which diverted the attention from them by throwing the blame on North Korea.

It appears, then, that there’s plenty of blame (and credit) to go around. Keep in mind, however, that so far the FBI has no wavered from its