Hackers Nab Unreleased Michael Jackson Tracks From Sony

wiredmikey writes "Sony once again has found itself in the news surrounding another hacking-related incident. This time around, the breach doesn't appear to involve any lost user data or customer accounts, but instead, some valuable property owned by the record company. Today, several British news outlets have reported that more than 50,000 music tracks have been illegally accessed and downloaded by hackers, including a large number from the late Michael Jackson. Sony bought the catalog from Jackson's estate for $250 million in 2010, giving the company distribution rights to the unreleased music. The attack reportedly occurred shortly after details of the massive PlayStation Network breach last April, but details were only revealed this past weekend."

Comments

why?

[MickyTheIdiot]

Not every system you have needs to be connected to the Internet. Why in the world was such valuable digital property on a system that had ANY connection to the Internet, thorough NAT or otherwise?

I'm sorry... it just doesn't make sense. It's like all the talk of the vulnerable power grid... just don't put those items on the open internet. Or better yet... don't network them at all and have a human attend it in a secure place.

Where's the music?

[Dan East]

So where is this music? Why hasn't it spread far and wide over the net? I suspect the hackers are holding onto it in an attempt to blackmail Sony for a big chunk of cash.

distribution rights :)

[ciderbrew]

Sony, distribution is not a right. Well it's not now anyway.

Truly baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok. So 50,000 tracks got downloaded.

Let's say for sake of argument, and since this was from their digital archive according to news radio this morning, that each of these tracks were in format of uncompressed audio. Would they really keep tracks as AAC, MP3, or MPA in their digital archive? I'm gonna be generous here and say each track was 25MB. That's roughly, 125GB of data to be downloaded. That isn't something you do overnight. That's something that takes days if not weeks, and possibly a month. Massive net security failure here, or what?

You have an obviously massive amount of money invested in that archive, and yet you don't protect it with approriate network security? I have to wonder how much their yearly network security expenditure was to protect that investment. $10,000? Clearly, they still haven't gotten the message that network security is important, even after the PSN lashing.

As little as I want to sympathize with Sony and it's continual targetting by subverts of the net, I just can't. They're a multi-Billion dollar a year company who have been in business for DECADES! How are you still in business with blunders like this?!?!? How the hell can you go around dropping hundreds of Millions on music catalogues and not protect your investment?

On a personal note, I wrote off Sony in 2000 when I bought my last TV whose components shorted at half their estimated life-time. I'm just truly baffled that a company this large, and with such massive influence and monies, can't take its online presence seriously.

Support your artists

[GodfatherofSoul]

If you don't want to more and more corporate-produced, demographically-designed artists, start buying your damned CDs from the people you like instead of downloading it for free and complaining about how crappy music is nowadays. I'm not even a huge music fan, but I make a point to buy CDs when I hear something I like.