Town Hall Meeting

12 Dec 2014

Sony Hack Thoughts

Filed under: — Al @ 11:35 am

–UPDATE Jan 25, 2016 —-

Seems the hack caused little damage to their stock price as it is now $21.13, over a year later.

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My biggest surprise is that something this awful hasn’t happened before.  Usually hackers steal data and try not to make a big deal out of it.  Here, they seem clearly interested in taking down the company.  Sony is doing a great job helping them by having terrible security practices, having seeming racist email conversations, and having odd salary choices.  So far, the data made public has included:

1. Internal email communications
2. Full Employee Records (SSN, offer letters, salary, etc)
3. Medical information, including what treatments were being given and how much they cost
4. Intellectual Property (soon to be released movies, scripts)

Some of the more sensational things are the conversations between the chair of Sony Amy Pascal and a powerful producer Scott Rudin. Some published emails show them making very racist comments about President Obama and condescending ones about Angelina Jolie. The innocent victims are all the current and former rank and file at Sony who now how to live with very private medical data online and/or their SSN forever.

Someone obviously wants Sony to go down and go down hard. No one knows who actually did it yet or how they did it. Sadly if Sony would have kept all this data separate at least they could have minimized the damage. Why have accounting data on the same subnet as your intellectual property? Its insane. I have a feeling their security department is either non-existent or not big enough for their network size.

As of today their stock is worth $20.74 today and was $21.63 the day the hack was made public on Nov 24. A couple questions linger for me: will Pascal get fired for her clearly racist remarks and will lawsuits from employees be allowed to go through the courts and how much the damages will be?

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