I wish people would stop calling this a hack. It's not a hack, it was a cyberwarfare. I know someone who was working on the team trying to recover from this attack, and Sony Pictures is basically fucked. Their IT infrastructure has been utterly destroyed, meaning they can't even pay their employees, pay their vendors or take orders from customers. They don't even want to use computers anymore, people call and text now to avoid any sort of central infrastructure that can be hacked. They had to switch to all-manual processes, and it will take months or likely years before their infrastructure is back within some sort of semblance.
But by then Sony Pictures as an entity may no longer exist. From all of the emails being released ridiculing their own talent, to their employees having their privacy destroyed and financial accounts hacked, who could work for this company again?
The thing this attack does is raise the bar as to what to expect. The worst we had heard until now was credit cards being stolen for quick gains, maybe some business secrets being stolen. But in my mind it started with lulzsec a couple of years ago where the attitude was for anarchy and cyberwar. But if the new trend is for companies to get destroyed, then cybersecurity will go to the next level where every company has to assume if they get hacked, they will get destroyed, so it becomes probably even more critical than other business processes.
But by then Sony Pictures as an entity may no longer exist. From all of the emails being released ridiculing their own talent, to their employees having their privacy destroyed and financial accounts hacked, who could work for this company again?
The thing this attack does is raise the bar as to what to expect. The worst we had heard until now was credit cards being stolen for quick gains, maybe some business secrets being stolen. But in my mind it started with lulzsec a couple of years ago where the attitude was for anarchy and cyberwar. But if the new trend is for companies to get destroyed, then cybersecurity will go to the next level where every company has to assume if they get hacked, they will get destroyed, so it becomes probably even more critical than other business processes.