Life is a bitch! And if you are a leader it's lonely at the top and every other guy in the universe is trying to pull you down (even if he is not capable of taking up your chair).
The Sony management must be praying their guts out calling for divine intervention hoping lightning strikes the people who hacked them. The question God is bound to ask them - should I strike the guys who came first, second or the third time? And, who are they?
Wow! That's a big question and no one knows the answer. The FBI seems to know (for certain) it is North Korea.. but then these guys in US agencies are so sure of things that are reasons used for going to war.
Remember the WMDs everyone was screaming about before the attack on Iraq. Years later that President has gone and there are no WMDs and no one is asking! Who cares! Defense suppliers made billions and the bottom line is what matters. Who cares if a few third world countries have been reduced to ghettos and slums.
The Mr Obama tells Sony - you did the wrong thing, You should have called me and I would have sent my bombers to unleash destruction. Does anyone have a clue about what happened and from where and who did that what happened thingy.
Oh yes, these very same players (Mr O, FBI and other intelligence agencies and security companies) have been lampooning China until recently. Pointing fingers at their capability and their unethical hacking of networks around the world. A fundamental question for the US Administration is that until a few weeks earlier you were talked about China being the biggest villian of them all. And now it is North Korea.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/US-seeks-Chinas-help-after-cyberattack/articleshow/45590647.cms
Read the article and laugh at the statement of the government saying that the US and China believe that destructive attacks violate the norms of appropriate behavior in cyberspace! ROTFL ! Imagine the US talking about appropriateness in cyberspace. So what was Prism and Stuxnet ? Good behavior? This is hilarious.
Anyway to come back to dear Sony - this has become bad. And what is worse is that a threat is issued by some unknown entity and every single theater owner across the US is too scared to run the movie, And Sony is too scared to release the movie too.
Till date enough dirt and sh*** has already been revealed by the hackers through the emails made public. The opinion of Sony executives for people like Angelina Jolie is now common knowledge and one would like to believe that there cannot be more dirtier smelling dirt still to come! Apparently there is more disastrous stuff so this big corporation has had to go down on it'e knees.
Along with the theater owners across the nation!
Such is the power of the unwritten word, such is the power of a breach - how it hits you, you will not know. Sony thought it was a hack, they did something. Another happened, and they again did something. And now this is BIG and they jusy dom't know how bad it will be.
- It has turned out to be a reputation blaster and the reps of most Sony top executives is in tatters.
- It has turned out to be a financial stinker and with the release stalled and with the IP (unreleased movies, stories) that have been stolen, it is anyone's guess.
- It has become the biggest corporate threat made in public ... and accepted by a frightened world.
One of the risks of cyber security was ransomware but this is a different type of ransomware! No hard drive has been encrypted. Instead, data has been stolen and the companies are paying ransom because they are scared of the revelations that are in the stolen data!
Now the US President is also in the fray and calls is a national issue.and the administration has said they will take action, What will they do... remains to be seen.
In the meanwhile, it is important for organizations and governments to relook at their security strategy, budgets and plans and make sure that things are in place, They must make sure that if things are in place it is not just for the sake of being in place but in reality!
Else, they all have to be prepared for doomsday type scenarios... times like the one at Sony where no one has a place to hide.