Move over Home Depot and Chase, Sony has just joined the club, and it isn’t pretty. Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse than Home Depot, it does, and it’s so bad that employees are tending to their work via pen and paper, while the network remains offline. The scale of destruction to Sony is up there with the Saudi Aramco attack that knocked 30,000 workstations offline due to malware. For Sony, this compromise is a double whammy since they are still recovering from the last massive breach three years ago that cost them an estimated $170M, and resulted in 50 class-action lawsuits where plaintiffs are seeking $2B in damages.
In July, Lions Gate was the victim of cyber theft, according to Todd Spangler at Variety, where DVD-quality copies of Expendables 3 began showing up at piracy sites. The attack on Sony and Lions Gate marks a major milestone for cyber thieves, and puts all studios on notice. Disney, especially Marvel is likely on high alert, and must take extra steps to beef up their security posture, in order to protect the billion dollar franchises of Iron Man and X-men. Sony has engaged the FBI and Mandiant (FireEye) to help fix things up. Mandiant is the global leader in forensics and incident response, and it’s almost certain they will find the culprits behind the breach. The Sony breach hits home hard since their studios are right here in LA. They need to hand over the keys to all things security to IBM, and let Big Blue take care of their security posture from now on, so they can focus on making cool movies.
