What the Sony Hack Looked Like To Employees (slate.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The cyber attack on Sony was one of the highest profile hacks in the past several years. Slate tracked down two dozen people who worked there at the time, and asked them what it was like on the inside while it was happening. Quoting: "The telephone directory vanished. Voicemail was offline. Computers became bricks. Internet access on the lot was shuttered. The cafeteria went cash-only. Contracts—and the templates those contracts were based on—disappeared. Sony's online database of stock footage was unsearchable. It was near impossible for Sony to communicate directly with its employees—much less ex-employees, who were also gravely affected by the hack—to inform them of what was even happening and what to do about it. 'It was like moving back into an earlier time,' one employee says." Some employees had their workloads doubled, some had nothing to do. While the hack brought the company together at the beginning, it eventually descended into recriminations and lawsuits.

Comments

They aren't really still blaming DPRK, are they?

[damn_registrars]

I was never sold on that explanation. The notion that North Korea even could pull it off - let alone would - I find to be absurd. Certainly if they had the ability, someone in that crew would have been aware of the Streisand Effect by now and would have said it was an awful idea. I watched The Interview, which was an awful movie - if the North Koreans wanted it to go away the right thing to do would have been to let it fail on its own. Had Sony not gotten this free PR for it, the movie would have promptly fallen into the same realm as Manos: Hands of Fate and various other un-watchables.

Re:They aren't really still blaming DPRK, are they

[Narcocide]

Let us not forget either, that it was hardly the only high-profile hack on Sony in recent years which showed them to be exhibiting signs of severe negligence with regards to network security basics. In 2011 the PlayStation network was hacked, interrupting service for weeks and compromising the personal details of approximately 77 million accounts.

Hint to "network security" noobs working for high-profile businesses; storing the user's own passwords at the client-side, even encrypted, is a stupid, catastrophically naive approach to alleviating load on your authentication servers. Allowing global administrative access through the same channel once you've done this is doubly so.

Of course it wasn't the DPRK

[Anonymous Coward]

What would the DPRK have to do with rootkits on shitty music CDs?

Oh, wait, _that_ hack... I guess I'm getting old.

Re:They aren't really still blaming DPRK, are they

[Xenx]

Lets be real here. There are perfectly logical reasons why they would refer to their computers as bricks. The most likely being every single activity they do on their computer could require network access. Another possibility, and I live this at work, is PCoIP. If/when the network connection goes down, so does my ability to do literally anything computer related.

Re:They aren't really still blaming DPRK, are they

[myrdos2]

I'd hoped that you'd gotten it through your skull
About what's figurative and what's literal
But just now
You stated
You literally couldn't do anything computer related
That really makes me want to literally

Uh... Go back in time so your parents never dated? ...That seems kind of harsh.

*Looks up PCoIP*. Ah, shit.

"Like going back to an earlier time"

[PopeRatzo]

Yeah, a time before Sony was an evil fucking corporation. The late 19th century, I think.

Re:They aren't really still blaming DPRK, are they

[Fire_Wraith]

First, I don't work at Sony, nor did I in the past.

I do know that they ramped up and hired a bunch of people to build a CIRT after the PSN hack. The rumor that I heard was that those guys wound up in the wonderful situation of a CIRT, working for Corporate (Big Sony) that is responsible for everything, but doesn't have the power to necessarily tell the individual subsidiaries (like Sony Pictures) what to do, let alone do something like threaten to cut off network access unless issues are addressed.

So you could well wind up with a shitshow where one subsidiary is running a flat network, has executives who don't care, and tell IT to just "make it work" all the while cutting costs to the bone (that part about having Bain come in, in TFA, especially)? Yeah, I could easily envision that as having been the case, especially since I don't believe the hack affected anyone else in Sony, only the Sony Pictures unit. Not saying that's how it went, but I would not be surprised in the slightest.