Elizabeth Weise

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — An e-mail that claims to be from the group that hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment blames the attack on the studio's upcoming comedy about North Korea.

The e-mail was posted to a popular code hosting site on Monday. It appeared to be from the same "Guardians of Peace", or GOP, group that e-mailed the company previously. It said the company must stop showing "the movie of terrorism."

The movie referred to is, presumably, The Interview. It features James Franco and Seth Rogen as tabloid TV journalists who score an interview with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

As they prepare to travel to the secretive nation, they're recruited by the CIA to assassinate Kim. The movie premiers on Thursday and will be released on Christmas Day.

The e-mail instructs Sony to "Stop immediately showing the movie of terrorism which can break the regional peace and cause the War!"

Sony Pictures Entertainment on Monday declined to comment on the e-mail.

Sony Pictures Entertainment was hit by hackers Nov. 24. A glowing red skeleton appeared on screens throughout the Culver City, Calif.-based Sony subsidiary.

Some hard drives and servers were destroyed and employees were forced to work off their phones and avoid laptops and computers. Massive amounts of data were stolen and posted to hacker sites, including five full-length Sony movies, four of which hadn't yet been released.

North Korea has denied it is behind the Sony hack.

Sony's PlayStation store also suffered an outage on Monday. There was no indication the outage was linked to the same group.

The possibility of North Korean involvement seems tenuous, at least from a linguistic perspective, said Timothy Tangherlini, a professor at UCLA who researches Korean nationalism.

"While everything about that e-mail screams 'Not a native English speaker' or perhaps, 'not an English speaker at all', it doesn't strike me as particularly Korean," he said.

Clark Sorensen, who chairs the Korean Studies program at the University of Washington in Seattle, agreed.

"I've read the passage, and while it does seem to be by a non-native speaker of English, it doesn't strike me as having typical Korean mistakes," he said.

However Tangherlini noted that North Korea is known for having propaganda specialists who have native fluency in English. So the mangled English could merely be an attempt at disinformation.

In June, North Korea sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon denouncing the movie as "undisguised sponsoring of terrorism, as well as an act of war."

The posted message appears to follow the same line of thought.

"We have already given our clear demand to the management team of SONY, however, they have refused to accept," it said. "Do carry out our demand if you want to escape us."

Whoever posted the email goes on to taunt the company and the FBI, which is investigating the attack.

"You, SONY & FBI, cannot find us. We are perfect as much."

The FBI had no comment Monday.

Despite the e-mails and postings, who exactly is behind the devastating attack on a company that had revenues of $2.6 billion last quarter is unknown.

Sony said on Saturday it believes a group of "organized attackers" are behind the attack. By that, the company seems to be ruling out a single disgruntled worker or lone hacker and possibly fingering an organized group or nation state.

However Kellman Meghu, head of security engineering for Check Point Software Technology, says the attack doesn't seem to "be beyond the scope of a small group of talented programmers and hackers to pull off."