It sounds like a plot straight out of Hollywood. A giant movie studio is hacked exposing everything from CEO salaries to celebrity name-calling. Except, this is a real life drama for Sony Pictures. The hackers who accessed the movie studios network exposed confidential data on more than 47,000 current and former employees. Confidential information like social security numbers, salary figures, and personal emails acquired then posted for the world to see and for some to pirate and profit off the data.
It’s a modern day warning of how vulnerable the information we share is and how susceptible that information can become. Yahoo Finance’s Editor-in-Chief, Aaron Task says we need to be more diligent with our communications, “It is a reminder to the rest of us and senior executives that you have to be careful what you put on any electronic medium. This is the advice we give our kids when they become teens and get on social networks. It looks like these executives never got that lesson.”
Sony investigators are linking the hack to a group affiliated with North Korea who are angry at the film giant’s upcoming movie “The Interview.” The film stars Seth Rogen and James Franco who are tasked by the CIA to assassinate North Korea leader Kim Jong Un. While the attention the movie is receiving may be good for box office numbers, it’s going to cost Sony a lot of money to clean up. Some estimates say Sony may have to spend upwards of $100 million to resolve the debacle. In 2011, Sony’s PlayStation Network was also hacked costing the company an estimated $171 million.
Task says the Sony hack should serve as a wake-up call to all corporations about what you say in a public forum: “Unless you whisper something in someone’s ear, it’s potentially public. In the world we live in today. E-mail and text is the assembly line. And that assembly line has been shut down by this attack.” The Sony hack is the latest in a string of major breaches to infect the corporate world. Earlier this year, a cyber attack on Home Depot exposed credit card information and email addresses of over 50 million customers. VIDEO
Posts
