The Lazarus Heist S1: 1. Hacking Hollywood

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deals and ways to save. When Vivint Smart Security gives you a smarter way to protect and its smart thermostats give you a smarter way to save, well, that's a smarter way to live. Get the smarter home system that just gets you. at vivint.com. all those movies you thought were made in Hollywood? Gone with the Wind, The Matrix, Ben-Hur? Well, they weren't filmed in Hollywood at all. They were actually shot across town in an area of Los Angeles County called Culver City.

That's where you'll find the old MGM film lot. This place is huge and it's legendary. And there are these two white arched gates at the front. Step through them and you're in Fantasyland. The first thing you see is this massive rainbow sculpture. It's an homage to one of my favorite movies, The Wizard of Oz. And all around you are these mammoth billboards showcasing upcoming movie releases

and also these towering facades that are painted like shops. A dry cleaner, a bowling alley, a movie marquee. You can go on a public tour of the place, and they still make TV programmes on the lot, so there's always a chance of glimpsing a Star Wars tour as you mooch around.

And there are movie-themed rides to go on as well. But away from the Glitz, the MGM lot is a workplace like any other. It's the HQ of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Behind the buzz of the sound stages and celebs, hundreds of Sony's employees keep the place ticking. Among them... Selena Chavanet, how to describe me, a super awesome person all the time.

Selena's in a glamorous workplace, yes, but her job's kind of mundane. It sounds fancy being in Hollywood, but it's really just being in a cubicle, working on the computer. So yeah, it's a lot of computer work and spreadsheets. But the perks are pretty sweet. Like on your breaks or lunchtime, you get to go walk around and like you could see sets and productions.

I'm very social, so I would walk around and talk to everybody and then try to get on the set. Like I got a tour of the Jeopardy set and I got in trouble a bunch of times hanging out at the shark where Jaws is on the ride. I'll go places until people tell me no. Then on Monday the 24th of November 2014, something strange happens. It was weird to try and get into the office because I was like, I can't scan my badge to get in. It doesn't seem like a big deal at first.

Her security badge suddenly stops working, so she has to get signed in by the security guards. But that broken badge turns into a big headache. They networked everything. Your badge was basically your key to get anywhere. So you had to scan your badge driving in the lot. You had to scan it to get into the building, scan it to get into the rooms. And so I was like, oh, well, this is interesting. And it isn't just Selena's badge. It's everyone's.

And it's not just the doors that are out of action. Something is going haywire with the technology at the heart of Sony's giant global entertainment operation. No computers were on. Everybody that was in the office was just kind of...

Talking to each other, trying to figure out what was going on, waiting for Xerox people to come in and take off the network for the copy machines. So that you could photocopy things. You can have these fax stuff. We went analog style. So you couldn't... even fax or photocopy anything even that fairly low tech thing was off limits yeah because they just like a couple weeks before they just networked all of the pruners and the copy machines and we couldn't do it

Those broken printers are just a hint of the damage that's about to unfold. Selina's employer is now the target of a meticulously planned digital assault, and it's got one aim, annihilate Sony Pictures Entertainment. A few days before Selena's past stopped working, senior executives at Sony had received a very strange email from someone calling himself Frank David. And that email said...

We have got great damage by Sony Pictures, the compensation for it, monetary compensations we want. Pay the damage, or Sony Pictures will be bombarded as a whole. You know us very well. We never wait long. You better behave wisely. Right, so you've got vague threats issued in dodgy English. That sounds like classic spam email, doesn't it? But the message is real.

Someone is about to do Sony very great damage indeed. A virus is sweeping through the company's network, disabling computer after computer. Three days later, when Sony employees log into their machines, things get a bit bizarre. One by one, a horror film image of a blood-red skeleton with fangs and glaring eyes takes over their screens. An image that's as cheesy as it is threatening. And if that isn't scary enough, there are sound effects to go with it.

Superimposed over the skeleton on screen is an ominous message that reads... Warning. We've already warned you, and this is just the beginning. We continue till our request be met. We've obtained all your internal data including your secrets and top secrets. If you don't obey us, we'll release data shown below to the world.

The data consists of five links, and if you click on them, you get lists of folders containing incredibly sensitive information. We're talking executive salaries, confidential internal emails, insider gossip. It's the kind of embarrassing dirty laundry that no company wants out there. There are also details of as yet unreleased films. And whoever sent the message is threatening to leak them. The skeleton graphics, the over-the-top sound effects.

This looks like some kind of prank from a horror movie, but the attack is deadly serious. It's the opening salvo in a battle to destroy Sony Pictures. And by the end... half of its global digital network will be wiped out. Some of the most powerful players in Hollywood will lose their jobs, and the digital break-in will spark an international incident.

The hacking gang behind the attack are one of the most dangerous in the world. They've earned themselves a nickname, the Lazarus Group. They're named after the biblical figure who is brought back from the dead. And once Lazarus Group get inside their victims' computers, it's very hard to kill them off. Sony is just the start for them. They'll go on to stage one of the most audacious cyber crimes the world has ever seen, a bank heist targeting one billion dollars.

These attackers have no fear. How in the world did this happen? No one in their right mind, no cyber criminal had tried to transfer $1 billion from a bank. A terrifying... Incident, probably one of the most terrifying that I've ever seen. It was astounding. From the BBC World Service, this is The Lazarus Heist. I'm Geoff White.

And I'm Jean Lee. I've been investigating cybercrime for more than a decade, and in my world, the Lazarus Group are kind of legendary. It's not just Sony. They've been breaking in all over the world in all sorts of places. Banks, TV stations, even hospitals.

They're dangerous because they're unpredictable. You never know where they'll strike next. And they don't seem to care about getting found out. There are lots of cybercrime gangs, of course there are. But according to investigators, the Lazarus Group is different. They're working for a nation state, North Korea. And that doesn't seem to make any sense, right? This is a tiny, desperately poor country where most people can't even access the internet.

So the question I had was, how come this place, of all countries, has become a computer hacking superpower? How do they operate? And what's driving them? And that's where Gene comes in. I'm not a cyber expert, but I know North Korea. So I started reporting there in 2008, and I was the first American journalist to open a news bureau in Pyongyang. And in my years there, I saw a huge change.

I saw the new leader Kim Jong-un making big new investments in science and technology. Computers, mobile phones. Now, Kim claims he's just trying to modernize North Korea for his country's economic survival. But reporting on North Korea often means trying to get past the propaganda, and sometimes there are sinister, more dangerous motives. Kim is training a new generation of cyber warriors.

These are young computer whizzes who can hack into places that are supposed to be secure and wanted to know what they were up to and why.

Episode 1, Hacking Hollywood. Who would be right to play me? That's a good question. You need to have like a somewhat classic neurotic... I'm sort of a balding guy. I'd love somebody like 20 pounds thinner than me. That's Dan Sterling. He's a screenwriter, and he's worked on some of the most provocative comedies around, from South Park to The Daily Show.

I come from a long line of feather-ruffling writers and activists. The things that most interest me are things that are political in nature, and it's only fun if it's provocative. Dan had been working with writer-actor Seth Rogen and writer-producer Evan Goldberg, who between them were behind a string of comedies like Knocked Up and Sausage Party. So not exactly highbrow stuff, right, but very successful. And back in the late 2000s...

Seth and Evan came to me with this very rudimentary idea. The logline was, what if, and this was when Osama bin Laden, I think, was still alive. They said, you know, what if you... We're a journalist, and you got an interview with Osama bin Laden. Would you kill him during the interview? Dan really likes the idea, but...

He's aware there's already a comedy in development featuring a Middle Eastern leader called The Dictator, starring Sacha Baron Cohen. So I started kicking around for ideas like, well, all right, if it's not bin Laden, you know, who is epic enough? that will make it feel world stakes level enough. And then I had a drink with a friend, he's like, oh, it's got to be North Korea. And I was like, oh yes, of course it does. And that one tiny decision changed everything.

At first, Dan says it hadn't occurred to him to use the North Korean leader's real name. I just made up a name that sounded like his and it was obviously a stand-in for him. It wasn't until much later that I was sitting in a trailer with Seth and Evan and some executives, and they said, we just want to try this. What would happen? if you changed it out from your fictitious name to Kim Jong-un. And as soon as they said it, I thought, of course, that is so much edgier.

It's just much more provocative and much more titillating to take a swat at the real person. And why not? I mean, it did not seem very controversial at the time to mock. one of the world's most dastardly living people. And it was only very shortly before we started shooting that...

The studio suggested, you know what, let's not do that. That might be a bit too provocative. But at that point, Seth and Evan and I were all pretty invested, and Seth and Evan are pretty powerful guys, and they pushed back. And soon enough, the actor Randall Park is chosen to play the role of Kim Jong-un. He is the real-life millennial leader of North Korea who came to power in December 2011. He interpreted... Kim Jong-un as this insecure, bashful guy.

who, you know, is very vulnerable and is very sort of awestruck by American celebrities. Hey, thank you. So you really like the show. No, I might not show it, but I'm freaking out. You're like a super fan.

I really am. Yeah, that's so cool. Don't say something stupid, Keem. The plot takes shape. The main characters are a TV host, played by James Franco, and his producer, played by Seth Rogen. They discover that Kim Jong-un is a fan of their show, and that's how they managed to secure an interview with him. And then suddenly they're on the world stage, hyping up this big, you know, one-on-one interview, the first interview with the leader of North Korea.

But as they're preparing for it, they're approached by the CIA. You want us to assassinate the leader of North Korea? Yes. What? If we kill him... Won't they just get another chubby dude with a goofy hairdo to come in and replace him? Exactly. And then the same thing happens? Actually, we're aware of a small faction and the existing leadership that already wants him gone. They want change. They're too scared to act alone. And they need you two.

to go in there, remove Kim, embolden them to revolt and take over. And then when they get to North Korea, what happens is Kim Jong-un is charming and... He and James Franco sort of have a bromance. I'm 31 years old. The fact that I am running a country is crazy. What am I to do when 24 million people look to me as their leader, their God? What am I to do when my father's dying wish was for me to carry his torch?

The bromance comes to an end when Franco's character discovers that he's been lied to. Spoiler alert, he does kill Kim Jong-un. His death is portrayed in slow motion and it's graphic and it is brutal. And yes, it's an actor playing Kim Jong-un, but the movie does show the killing of a sitting head of state. And this isn't just any head of state we're talking about.

Jean, to say that North Korea's rulers in particular are a bit touchy about their appearance would be a massive understatement, right? Oh, absolutely. The image of the Kims is considered sacrosanct. I mean, they are treated like gods in their country. They say the Kims are descended from Mount Paektu, and this is a revered mountain in the very far north. That's the mountain that the Koreans believe this mythical figure, Dangun, is said to have descended as well.

He was half-bare, according to the mythology. And he's said to have founded ancient Korea 5,000 years ago. And because the Kins are said to have been descended from Mount Bektu, like Dangun, they say that they're endowed with... Not superpowers quite, but extraordinary abilities. They say that the skies crack open when the Kims are born. You know, and when I interviewed children, they told me...

Kim Jong-un was a genius from the time of birth, and he was so precocious that he was driving a car at age three. Kim Jong-il, the first time he played golf, hit a hole in one. So just these extraordinary capabilities that set them apart from average, ordinary, everyday North Koreans.

I heard that if you have a newspaper with one of the Kim's pictures on it, you're not allowed to throw it in the dustbin in North Korea. You have to hand it to an official who can then dispose of that. That was one of the first things I was told by the North Koreans on my first trip to North Korea.

is that if you get a newspaper or magazine, don't crumple it up. Like we might crumple up a newspaper and throw it in the bin. And they were like, absolutely do not do that. Just gently lay it on top of the bin because...

crumpling up or desecrating the image of the leader in any way would be considered or could be considered an anti-state crime. And so I can probably guess the answer to this very moment we just talked about. What would the North Korean regime make of a film showing the assassination of...

Kim Jong-un. Oh, absolutely inconceivable. I mean, they don't even allow any actors, apart from one very early movie, to portray the leaders, to portray the kids. They just don't think anyone's worthy of portraying them.

So to depict Kim Jong-un's assassination, we'd be considered a crime of the highest magnitude, and that would, I would guess, be punishable by death. And not just a quiet death, but... very likely a public execution in which the accused would be obliterated by anti-aircraft artillery. Wow. So perhaps understandably, before they release this film, the interview, Sony begins to ask for advice about it. Sony goes to a defense expert at the Rand Research Institute for advice.

And then Sony decides to go ahead with the assassination scene, but they tone it down to make it less grisly. And by the end of the summer of 2014... Posters were going up and billboards were going up all over town. And the trailer leaves no doubt as to the plot of Dan Sterling's script. Want to go kill Kim Jong-un? Totally. I'd love to assassinate Kim Jong-un. It's a date. We'll be back after this. Hi, I've been given a few moments to talk to you about my podcast, Death in Ice Valley.

I'm Mari Tigraf. For years now, I've been investigating the case of a woman who died in terrible and strange circumstances in Norway in 1970. Her identity remains a mystery. Death in Ice Valley is trying to find out as much about her as we can. And I'm working on a brand new episode about some stories discovered by following leads which came straight.

from our listeners. It will be released in a few weeks so if you haven't heard the first 11 episodes or want to listen to them again now could be a good time. Search for Death in Ice Valley wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to Jeff and Jean.

Thousands of miles away from Hollywood, news of the movie was filtering through to the North Korean capital. Where, Gene, you were there, you were a journalist and an American, just like one of the main characters of the movie. What did you make of it? Well, it might have seemed like a lark from where they were sitting in Los Angeles, but there was nothing funny about the premise of the movie for me sitting in Pyongyang.

I was working as a foreign correspondent in North Korea in 2013 when I first heard that Seth Rogen was making this comedy about journalists doubling as CIA agents in North Korea. My first reaction was... Great. Just What I Need, another movie that reinforces the impression that American journalists are working for the CIA. Trust me, when you're in Pyongyang, you don't take suspicions of espionage lightly because it's...

Always a risk for any of us working in North Korea. Right, so it can't have been easy to set up a bureau in Pyongyang. It wasn't easy. It took years of strategic negotiations. I mean, I had to convince them to let a journalist from the enemy U.S. set-up shop in Pyongyang. But, you know, I don't look like the caricatures they grew up with. These tall... spinly,

soldiers with straw colored hair. And so just to tell you what I look like, I'm a second generation Korean American. I was born and raised in the Midwest. So I look familiar to them, but I am definitely distinctly different. And as one of the North Korean negotiators said, I'm definitely not a spy for South Korea because my Korean is just not good enough. I laughed at his joke. It was nervous laughter because there's always a tinge of a threat in their jokes.

So I was very aware every single second of every single day that I was in North Korea that I could be accused of espionage. You know, it's not just my own paranoia. That's exactly what happened to a pair of American journalists in 2009. We fear that at any moment we could be sent to a hard labor camp. That's Laura Ling. She and Yunali spent months in captivity and eventually were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor. But in the end, help came from high up. We were taken to a location.

And when we walked through the doors, we saw standing before us President Bill Clinton. It's been years but hearing that audio still gives me the chills. I still feel Laura's terror in my bones.

The North Koreans used these two journalists as bait to get a former American president, Bill Clinton, to meet with their leader. You know, my job as a journalist was trying to get on the ground in North Korea, but... I knew I was always at risk of becoming the next American in North Korean custody if they had a pretext or a need to take an American hostage, which a movie like The Interview could have been.

So I was not happy when I heard about this Seth Rogen film in 2013. It's so dangerous to underestimate North Korea and its capacity for retaliation. And the North Koreans will use any slight or threat as a pretext for provocation. Sure enough, in June 2014, the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations sends a letter to the UN and it pulls no punches whatsoever.

To allow the production and distribution of such a film on the assassination of an incumbent head of a sovereign state should be regarded as the most undisguised sponsoring of terrorism as well as an act of war. The United States Authority should take immediate and appropriate actions to ban the production and distribution of the aforementioned film. Otherwise, it will be fully responsible for encouraging and sponsoring terrorism.

To which the film's writer and star Seth Rogen replies in a tweet, people don't usually want to kill me for one of my movies until after they've paid 12 bucks for it. And on the subject of Twitter and Seth Rogen, he and I actually had a back and forth on Twitter. We were trying to work out whether there were any other...

fictional films where a real world leader gets assassinated or murdered. And I think we worked out the only other ones were the Hot Shots franchise starring Charlie Sheen, where Saddam Hussein gets killed in both films. But it has to be said, The Interview is one of a very, very small number of films where a sitting real world leader gets killed in a fictional film.

It's hilarious that you had this exchange with Seth Rogen himself, but I wish he had done that homework before making this movie because I can't help but wish they had done what movies do for every other country. create a fake country that looks and sounds a lot like a country like North Korea, with a leader who looks and sounds a lot like Kim Jong-un. Instead, what they've done is provide the North Koreans with an opportunity for retaliation.

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles... It was a couple days before Thanksgiving of 2014. I just remember thinking... Wow, this is terrible. This has never happened before. This must be terrifying for the employees. And the employees I talked to, it was terrifying. This is Tatiana Siegel. She's executive film editor at The Hollywood Reporter, and that's a publication that covers the latest twists and turns in the film and TV industry.

Tatiana has covered all the big stories, and she's interviewed many of the stars. But this was something else. As the story broke, she was away from the office for the holidays. Her vacation, though, was quickly put on hold. She remembers her desk piling up with newspaper clippings about the hack as she tried to pull it all together. It's one of those stories that I will never forget covering. It was really intense and it was really surreal.

Sony's a high-tech media company, and the fallout from the hack is severe. It even hits their local coffee shop. There was chaos. The phones didn't work. There was even a coffee bean on the lot. They still couldn't take credit cards six weeks after the hack. It doesn't stop there. As they said they would, the hackers started leaking the sensitive information that they had stolen from Sony.

emailing reporters directly and urging them to write stories about the leaks including people like Tatiana. The first time they contacted me and said that they had this information that I might find. interesting, you had to click on a link to get the hacked information. So I forwarded it to my IT department and just said, I'm not clicking on this link without you telling me it's safe first.

I'm assuming there is a safe way to do it because they did. And when she eventually downloads the information. It was kind of a holy cow moment. This is what they've stolen. Followed by like eight more days of that where. it got more and more dramatic what was being revealed. Internal emails reportedly hacked and leaked claim to show a top producer criticizing Angelina Jolie's talent and ego bad-mouthing A-list actors like Tom Cruise, who they say can be difficult and demanding.

Celebrity aliases to employee social security numbers. Employees bashing Adam Sandler's movies. James Bond is now among the victims of the massive cyber attack. This after hackers already leaked copies of films like Annie and Brad Pitt's. Meanwhile, the studio's co-chairman and a powerful Hollywood producer are apologizing for their stolen emails. The two used racial jokes to mock President Obama. So it was emails, but it was also huge.

data dumps of studio information how much they were paying actors and actresses how much they were paying their executives things that were just very damaging to have out there in the ether. There is this sense that North Korea then, if they were behind the emails that were being sent to you and other journalists, you've ended up inadvertently potentially...

covering stuff that North Korea wanted you to cover. What do you make of that argument? Yeah, it's a very weird position to be in when you're covering hackers, that you're doing the bidding of... a criminal enterprise. You're corresponding with somebody who is doing something hugely destructive in the industry you work. It's uncomfortable.

However she felt about it, Tatiana's publication did go through the hacked data and did run stories on the dirt leaking out of Sony, and a lot of other outlets did too. Yeah, I felt so bad for all these very famous and powerful people impacted by that.

The executives that had supported this all the way through at Sony were under huge fire and it started to become a pretty heavy burden. That's Dan Sterling. We met him earlier. He's the screenwriter of the film The Interview. And so, you know, at a certain point, I think... the feeling of guilt and responsibility started to overtake the feeling of excitement and sort of wonder at having your first movie be so talked about.

By this stage, the hacking is being covered by the global media. Journalists covering the story began linking the hack to the release of the interview with its controversial depiction of Kim Jong-un's death. But despite the embarrassing leaks, despite the terrible damage to its IT systems, Sony's defiant. They decide to push on with the movie. And so they go ahead with the premiere. But by now the concerns about security aren't just digital.

They're physical as well. Thursday night's premiere of The Interview was heavy on security and light on star power. Actor Seth Rogen slipped by almost undetected. So as screenwriter Dan Sterling recalls, it wasn't exactly a buzzing, glamorous showbiz evening. The premiere was a rather depressing event.

You know, some of my friends texted me on the way over to the premiere saying that their publicists had told them not to come to the premiere because it was likely to get blown up. You know, one of these high-level executives from Sony... When I saw that person at the premiere in their seat, they were weeping, which is sort of a bummer. The security worries are now so high that some of the film's stars got given bodyguards for their houses, for themselves, their spouses.

Dan hadn't, and he started to get a bit worried. I called my lawyer and he hooked me up with this Israeli security agent. And I'm not going to imitate an Israeli accent, but he said basically, don't worry. You're the writer. Nobody cares about the writer. You're not important. You don't matter. You're fine. You don't need any security. And I said, well, what about just cybersecurity in case they...

kind of want to attack my bank account and said, trust me, no one cares about you. But meanwhile... Test audiences were liking the interview, and in spite of everything, some began to wonder if Sony might have a hit on its hands. We had reports of testing results. and the scores were higher than 22 Jump Street, which was a $200 million domestic box office performer. This is Ben Weisbren.

He is one of the executive producers of the interview. His job was to help organize the financing for the movie. Sounds good. This looks like it's going to be a hit. Yeah, I think it was going to be. But just five days after the premiere, all dreams of box office success come to a crashing halt. The Sony hackers publish a chilling new message on the internet. Warning. Soon. All the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made. The world will be full of fear.

The message goes on to threaten direct violence toward movie theaters showing the film, the interview, and makes reference to terrorist attacks. So what started out... as a cybercrime is now tipping into threats of real-world violence. That's next time on The Lazarus Heist. The Lazarus Heist is an original podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Jean Lee.

And I'm Geoff White, and we really hope you've enjoyed this first episode of The Lazarus Heist. It's a project we've been working on for a lot of months, and we are so excited that it's finally going out to listeners. We'd love to get your feedback on this, so if where you get your podcast allows it...

Please do leave us a rating and give us a review. It really does make a difference and it will help others find us. Remember to subscribe as well so that you don't miss any future episodes. And do spread the word on social media. We're using the hashtag Lazarus Heist.

We have people from around the world contributing. As you'll hear, the story will only get bigger and take us to unexpected places. And this time we want to give a special thanks to our two brilliant music composers, Magnus Fiennes. and also Lee Il-woo from the South Korean band Jambinai. Thanks for listening. A big bang. 13 Minutes to the Moon, Season 2. From the BBC World Service.

13 minutes to the moon tells the story of the dramatic rescue of Apollo 13. Lo and behold, again, I think another miracle, you know, that something like that would even work. With the astronauts and engineers who were there. We were heroes. we're ordinary people search for 13 minutes to the moon wherever you get your podcasts

Save on family favorites with digital coupons at Tom Thumb. This week at Tom Thumb, get boneless, skinless chicken breast or thighs for the member price of $1.75 per pound with digital coupon. Limit 10 pounds each. Plus, get selected varieties of 6 to 8-ounce Lucerne cheese for the member price of $1.77 each with digital coupon. Limit four. Also at Tom Thumb, get red or green seedless grapes for the member price of 97 cents per pound with digital coupon. Limit four.

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