The Sony Hack Attack

By now most people are pretty sick of hearing about how the internal networks at Sony's movie studio were flayed, gutted and served up to strangers on the Internet. The coverage gets repetitive after a while, despite how riveting it can be to read gossipy little tidbits, like the ludicrously subjective "greenlight studies" explaining which films get made and why, scripts, financial projections and actual copies of unreleased films, outside-vendor contracts, personal contact information of stars, along with some of their social security numbers and hotel-check-in-aliases of major stars, pissy emails between angry studio execs. Hand it to Sony; it can lose more colorfully than most companies can win.

               

Still, Sony got hacked so thoroughly that the temptation is to think it just got unlucky. Maybe it pissed off a murderous dictator with a coterie of surprisingly skillful cyber-saboteurs. Maybe it was too pinchpenny and abusive toward employees who decided to strike back – but on far too grand a scale for just a bunch of disgruntled office workers to pull off.

Regardless of who was involved, or what actually happened, Sony has set another in a string of similar accomplishments, by being the victim of an attack no one thought could happen at a large, technologically sophisticated company – a data breach so thorough and which went so deep inside the organization that people glommed on to the idea that the government of a nuclear-armed state struggling with poverty, political isolation and the entrenched, systemic insanity of its leadership could get so mad about a Seth Rogen movie that it would unleash the hounds on Sony's IT infrastructure before the movie was even released.

Granted, that's the only time it's possible to save yourself the pain of a Seth Rogen movie, but it still seems like an overreaction from a national government, even considering how often and by how much Iran and other national governments have been upping the ante on the game of international cyberwar ever since the revelation of Stuxnet showed it was possible to physically attack a country, militarily, without actually going there.