The IT Nerd

The title sounds overblown, but it isn’t. You might have heard that hackers broke into Sony Pictures and stole digital copies of a number of upcoming movies. But that may be only the tip of the iceberg according to Gizmodo:

Sony Pictures suffered a pretty devastating hack last week. In fact, according to documents recently leaked on the web, it looks like Sony Pictures might’ve just suffered one of the worst corporate hacks in history. Salary numbers, layoff strategies, personal details of laid off staffers, and some 3,800 Social Security numbers are now out in the open.

That’s really, really bad. Fusion’s Kevin Roose just published the details of 26 archives linked to in a Pastebin file purportedly from the attack. Therein is a trove of highly sensitive information about 6,000-plus Sony Pictures employees, details as specific as names, birthdays, and salaries. There are also a number of HR-related charts and spreadsheets that reveal how much it costs Sony Pictures to layoff workers as well as a division-by-division breakdown of salary numbers, including those of senior executives. And those Social Security numbers. There are those, too.

Well, I’d hate to be a past or present employee of Sony Pictures right about now.

Clearly, Sony did an absolutely craptastic job of securing their data. This is another example of why you need to have governments force companies to secure their data, and really really punish them to the fullest extent of the law when they don’t. Otherwise, these hacks will simply get worse in terms of scale and what gets stolen.