‘Sony tries to hinder downloads of stolen data’

Sony is trying to prevent downloads of its stolen data through a denial of service attack on bittorrent trackers, an American tech site reports. Internal emails and financial data from both Sony and employees are distributed via bittorrent after a hack.

Sony is trying to hinder the downloads of the data by bombarding bittorrent trackers with fake data, Recode says. Until a few years ago, Hollywood studios also used this method to prevent the distribution of new, popular films via the file-sharing protocol. According to Recode, Sony is using hundreds of Amazon Web Services virtual servers to carry out the denial of service attack.

The Sony hack would have captured a large amount of documents, which are currently being distributed via Bittorrent, among others, but a part is also leaked via Pastebin. Five separate collections of files have since been uploaded; for the latest collection of files, Sony’s action doesn’t seem to work, at least temporarily.

Ars Technica, which has seen the files, reports that Sony says in internal emails that it is not happy with the circumvention of geo-restrictions by Netflix customers. Customers of the video streaming site use plugins or VPN connections to view content that is really only available in other countries. Sony believes that Netflix is ​​doing too little against this. The site would fear losing subscribers if it took more measures.