Sony Pictures wihtout a dought had just suffered one of the worst corporate hacks in history last week. The hack included information such as Salary numbers, layoff strategies, personal details of laid off staffers, and some 3,800 Social Security numbers are now out in the open..the hackers, who refer to themselves as the Guardians of Peace, told the company, according to the Hollywood Reporter, before threatening to release that information unless its demands were met.
Therein so much personal information about a the 6,000-plus Sony Pictures employees, details as specific as names, birthdays, and salaries. There are also a number of HR-related charts and spreadsheets that reveal how much it costs Sony Pictures to layoff workers as well as a division-by-division breakdown of salary numbers, including those of senior executives. And those Social Security numbers. There are those, too. Not to meantion a few movie titles that have been released like Brad Pitt World War II vehicle Fury and the new version of the musical Annie. They also included several smaller films, like Still Alice, an intimate drama in which a character played by Julianne Moore suffers from early on-set Alzheimer’s; Mr. Turner, a biopic of a famed painter; and To Write Love on Her Arms, about the founding of the charity of the same name.
This is bad news for Sony Pictures, not just because of the volume of information leaked or its sensitive nature. It’s a clear indication that Sony Pictures, one of the major studios, did a completely piss-poor job with securing its data. Some people think that North Korea is behind the attack as a way to retaliate against The Interview, a Sony Pictures film about killing Kim Jong-Un. But now hackers everywhere know that Sony Pictures, for one, sucks at cyber security.