Sony Makes a Mess

At this point it's hard not to be at least somewhat aware of the mess that has come out of the massive hack at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

So far the company has managed to become a four time looser out of this...

  1. They were hacked
  2. A staggeringly large amount of proprietary and confidential data was lost and leaked
  3. The loss of money spent in producing and publicizing a movie that at least for now won't be released.
  4. The ever worsening PR disaster that the company has experienced since news of the hack first broke.

But it's Sony's last move, the decision to cancel the opening and release of The Interview that will probably have the worst and most widespread implications...

First let's get it out of the way - when I first heard about The Interview, I thought it was going to be just another in a line of mindless "comedies" that would get a lot of publicity, but ultimately flop at the box office and quickly fade into obscurity.  12 months from now you probably would have been able to find it in the $9.99 bargain DVD bin collecting dust...  By hacking into Sony and making it an issue - the movie got more traction and buzz than it would have gotten if it had been ignored outright.

That being said, Sony and the various theater chains caving to the bullying of the hackers was the worst thing it could possibly do.  I get that the companies were faced with a terrible choice - ignore the warnings and risk an incident at a theater and get accused of not doing enough to protect theater goers and deal with that taint on the movie, or cave to the demands of the hackers - don't run the risk of an incident, and take the PR hit for caving....

When looking at this purely from a human perspective - pulling the movie is an easy choice, even when there's no evidence of a credible threat - better to not have blood on your hands...

The thing is - of course the North Koreans were going to get mad over The Interview...  In the UK they went so far as to send some goons over from the Nork Embassy (thank you El Reg for gifting the world with the term Nork...) to try and bully a hair salon owner to take down a poster criticizing young Kim's hairstyle...  By the way, the owner left the poster up, a London hair stylist apparently is bolder than a multi-billion dollar trans-national corporation...   Sony couldn't have been so stupid as to think that the disciples of the Kim family weren't going to try some level of bluster that would get the world's attention.

But the implications of this decision are immense.  Sony has just told the world "the US Government might not be bullied or swayed by hackers and their demands - but US Companies - they'll cave in...."  It wasn't highly publicized, but Sony wasn't the only major hack of a US Corporation this year.  Sands Casinos were also hacked this year in an attack traced back to Iranian activists acting in response to comments made their majority shareholder regarding Iran.  The scope of the attack on Sands was just as broad as the Sony attack, but the attack was focused on destruction not on theft and disclosure...

Odds are hackers are in other companies too - and thanks to Sony caving - odds are other companies are now going to get demands too...  Company releases a product that your group wants to scuttle - hack them and threaten to physically attack any store that sells their product...  Blackmail a company in order to change their position or not release a product... Try and elicit a payoff, or payoffs from a company you want to damage...  Because if these tactics worked on Sony - you can bet they're going to be used on other companies too...

One of the US's great strengths is it's economy, and Sony just handed the worlds cybercrimals and terrorists a few thousand ways to attack the US economy...  

Posted on December 19, 2014 and filed under Technology.