Sony reaches agreement with former employees over hack

Sep 03, 2015

Sony Pictures has reached an undisclosed agreement in principle with eight former employees who had sued over inadequate protection of their personal data during last year's major hack against the studio.

Sony Pictures has reached an undisclosed agreement in principle with eight former employees who had sued over inadequate protection of their personal data during last year's major hack against the studio.

A document filed Wednesday in a Los Angeles court said Sony and the former employees "reached an agreement in principle to settle all of the claims" of the proposed class-action lawsuit.

The court has yet to validate the agreement, whose terms are unlikely to be disclosed. A spokesman for Sony Pictures declined to comment.

The complaint against the company was filed in December, a month after a group of hackers stole large amounts of personal data from some 47,000 current and former employees of the studio.

The cyberattack, one of the most publicized and destructive in recent years, seemingly made Sony Pictures employees vulnerable to identify theft and also unveiled numerous embarrassing emails from the studio's executives.

US authorities have suggested the hack came from North Korea in retaliation for the satirical film "The Interview" that featured the assassination of the country's leader North Korea's Kim Jong-Un.