Not knowing anything about it did not stop every damn "news" channel from saying "oh North Korea did it" then added at the end "but there is no proof". How can "news" call themselves news if all they do is speculate. Granted it wouldn't be entertaining if all they said was "Sony got hacked and we don't have any details" but that is why news is called news.
Nope! News is simply "here's some words you might be interested in reading, and hopefully believing: ...words here...". Journalism is a dying art.
So. Sony America suffered an outage on the Playstation Network due to a hack in 2011 causing 171 million in damages (that's the official figure, who knows how much the lost goodwill cost them ongoing). After that if they did not make cybersecurity priority number 1 then they deserve what they've gotten. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Effectively, Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment are about as related as Virgin Airlines and Virgin Mobile. Think of Sony (and any conglomerate in general) not as a parent company per se, but more like a VC firm or a majority-shareholder mutual fund; the executives of the Sony conglomerate don't really have any more insight into the component companies than those companies' other shareholders do. The only way business-process insight is going to be spread between the component companies is if the executives of one happen to read the trade press of the other.
Not knowing anything about it did not stop every damn "news" channel from saying "oh North Korea did it" then added at the end "but there is no proof". How can "news" call themselves news if all they do is speculate. Granted it wouldn't be entertaining if all they said was "Sony got hacked and we don't have any details" but that is why news is called news.
Is this a hack of a division of Sony? Because the executive names I found don't sound white. http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/executive/
> Now we all do, since about 40 gigabytes of sensitive company data from computers belonging to Sony Pictures Entertainment were stolen and posted online.
So. Sony America suffered an outage on the Playstation Network due to a hack in 2011 causing 171 million in damages (that's the official figure, who knows how much the lost goodwill cost them ongoing). After that if they did not make cybersecurity priority number 1 then they deserve what they've gotten. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Effectively, Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment are about as related as Virgin Airlines and Virgin Mobile. Think of Sony (and any conglomerate in general) not as a parent company per se , but more like a VC firm or a majority-shareholder mutual fund; the executives of the Sony conglomerate don't really have any more insight into the component companies than those companies' other shareholders…
Eh, if I am a majority shareholder then I will read the riot act to the company I hold a majority in after they lose $171M on shitty security. Also, http://www.sony.com/SCA/who-we-are/our-businesses.shtml lists all these so there is some cohesion. AFAIK there's no such Virgin supercompany.
It's Sony Pictures Entertainment that got hacked, not Sony. They're completely separate companies, yet the media fails to recognize that. Very annoying and confusing, it's almost deliberately.
Effectively, Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment are about as related as Virgin Airlines and Virgin Mobile. Think of Sony (and any conglomerate in general) not as a parent company per se , but more like a VC firm or a majority-shareholder mutual fund; the executives of the Sony conglomerate don't really have any more insight into the component companies than those companies' other shareholders…
Eh, if I am a majority shareholder then I will read the riot act to the company I hold a majority in after they lose $171M on shitty security. Also, http://www.sony.com/SCA/who-we-are/our-businesses.shtml lists all these so there is some cohesion. AFAIK there's no such Virgin supercompany.
Richard Branson is Virgin's sole-proprietor supercompany. :)
But yes, that's true—the investors would be mad at SCE. But would that, in turn, make them think of pulling aside SPE to give them the same talk? SPE isn't even doing anything involving running a public-facing web service; why would the investors presume they'd be at risk? It'd be like YCombinator calling in all their current batch of startups to give them a lesson on finances because one of them screwed up their bookkeeping.
The North Korean theory seems silly. In fact, it's exactly what I might say publicly if I were Sony and I wanted to try and turn lemons (being hacked) into lemonade (free buzz about an upcoming movie). The movie Kim Jong-un doesn't want you to see! In the end, I doubt there was any hacking involved at all: a disgruntled employee leaked documents. Perhaps Sony forgot to disable someone's password after giving them the…
If they did it on purpose it's even sillier. They may think that it would be cool to say they "got hacked by a state" especially if it's related to an upcoming movie about it, but to me it seems like amateur hour at Sony if they got hacked by North Korea , a country not exactly known for its advanced technology and high computer usage.
North Korea as a country might be behind the technological curve, but several reports indicate the the North Korean Army cyber warfare division is pretty well funded and advanced. There is a huge divide between the day to day realities of the average NK citizen and the realities of the upper echelons.