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 The email said it came from GOP, the shorthand for "Guardians of
Peace," the group that claimed responsibility for the hacking of
Sony that began Nov. 24, a Sony spokesman said.
The attack crippled the studio's computer network and exposed
sensitive data. The identity of the Sony hackers has not been
determined, and it was not clear if the emails came from the same
group.
Sony, a unit of Sony Corp, did not provide a copy of the email or
detail its contents.
The FBI, one of the U.S. government agencies probing the hacking,
"is aware of threatening emails that have been received by some
employees at Sony Pictures Entertainment," FBI spokesman Joshua
Campbell said in a statement.
"We continue to investigate this matter in order to identify the
person or group responsible," he said.
The emails could be from copycats purporting to be the hackers who
had obtained the addresses of Sony employees from the gigabytes of
data leaked over the Internet, said Marc Maiffret, chief technology
officer of cybersecurity firm BeyondTrust."Anybody could have
written this," said Maiffret. "You are going to have a lot of people
leveraging the stolen data that is available online for harassment
and fraud."The emails could mark the first high-profile follow-on
attempt to harass the company by other parties. Fraudsters are
likely to use other stolen data including Social Security numbers,
salaries, mailing addresses and proprietary information about the
company's operations to attempt to engage in a wide variety of scams
for a long time, he added.
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Sony has hired security firm FireEye Inc and its Mandiant forensics
unit to investigate the hacking.
North Korea is a principal suspect in the attack, a U.S. national
security source told Reuters on Thursday. A North Korean diplomat
denied that Pyongyang was behind the hack.
North Korea had vehemently denounced Sony film "The Interview," a
comedy about a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un,
scheduled for release on Dec. 25.
(Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
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