We all know about the fallout from last year’s Sony email hack. But the way the hackers distributed the information to the public remains both mysterious and savvy.
As a sidebar to Steve Kroft‘s “60 Minutes” piece on the scandal (which was watched by about 12 million people last night, according to Nielsen), the show’s “60 Minutes Overtime” team has the story of how the hackers leaked the data to the media with the presumption the websites would not hesitate to publish the sensitive information.
BuzzFeed reporter Matt Zeitlin explained to Kroft that he first thought the leaked emails arriving in his inbox were some sort of hoax or virus. Once Zeitlin realized rival Fusion was generating headlines with the same information, he decided to enlist his IT department to dig through the content.
Eventually, BuzzFeed reported controversial remarks by Sony exec Amy Pascal, threats against moviegoers and a ton of private data stolen by hackers.