SPECTRE filming continues despite James Bond script leak in Sony hack

Filming is underway on James Bond thriller SPECTRE,despite the leak of a draft script in a huge hack of material from Sony Pictures.

Daniel Craig and co-star Rory Kinnear took to a London canal in a speedboat on Tuesday for a waterborne sequence.

The Sam Mendes-directed movie is filming at several London locations this week, and will later travel to Italy, Morocco, Mexico and Austria.

The film's title is the name of a terrorist organization featured in several early Bond films, but details of the plot had been a well-guarded secret until Bond producer EON Productions acknowledged on the weekend that an early version of the script was among material stolen in the Sony cyberattack.

Details of the SPECTREscript and executives' email exchanges about it have since circulated online.

Fans say franchise will survive

Ajay Chowdhury of the James Bond International Fan Club said the Bond franchise would survive the leak, but the attack was damaging.

A lawyer for Sony Pictures Entertainment has warned news organizations not to publish details of company files leaked by hackers in one of the largest digital breaches ever against an American company.

• Sony warns staff on fraudsters misusing stolen data

But reams of sensitive material have already become public, including embarrassing emails in which executives and producers criticized stars and made racially offensive jokes about President Barack Obama.

Speculation has raged about the identity of the hackers, with some suspecting North Korea struck in retaliation for Sony-produced movie The Interview.The comedy depicts an assassination attempt on leader Kim Jong Un.

North Korea has condemned the film, but denied the hack.

Chowdhury said the saga was "almost a Bondian plot the world entertainment industry, a trillion-dollar industry, held to ransom by nefarious hackers."

SPECTREis due for release in November 2015.