Elizabeth Weise

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO - Sony Pictures Entertainment was hit by hackers on Monday and the company told employees to turn off their computers and disable Wi-Fi as a result, reports say.

The hackers appeared to be holding the company hostage and demanded that the company obey them or they would release presumably private data.

The first indication of the problem appeared Monday morning as an image of a red, glowing skeleton on company's computers, Deadline.com reported.

Accompanying the image was a warning that the system had been "Hacked by #GOP."

It went on to say "we've already warned you, and this is just a 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 the data shown below to the world."

The message is followed by five links to zip files.

Multiple examples of the image were posted to Twitter and at least one was posted on Reddit.

Variety reported that Sony Pictures Entertainment employees were told not to connect to corporate networks or access email. The attack was not affecting other divisions of Sony Corp., Variety said.

What information the files contained and whether they were indeed made public was not clear as of Monday.

USA TODAY email and calls to Sony on Monday were not immediately returned.