There is nothing like trying to scoop up water after it has spilled, but the hapless management team at Sony believe it can be done and they have rolled out their lawyers to help in the process.
Sony Pictures has requested that media organisations who have been reporting on the leaks following the hacking of Sony servers stop publishing the information syndicated by the hackers.
Sony has requested that organisations like SmartHouse and ChannelNews stop reporting the contents of the leaks.
The movie studio has written to a number of sites and organizations, telling them that the gigabytes of confidential employee, financial, and other corporate data must be deleted, and to cease publishing content relating to the hack attack.
In the letter, published by The Verge among others, Sony asks publications who “suspect” they may have any of the stolen information in their possession to contact the company, “take all reasonable actions” to prevent anyone working on behalf of the publication from acquiring, reading, or distributing the information, and to have the files deleted.
If the request is not met, the letter states Sony Pictures will “have no choice but to hold you responsible for any damage or loss arising from such use or dissemination by you, including any damages or loss to SPE (Sony Pictures Entertainment) or others,” including the loss of value of intellectual property and trade secrets.
A large number of reports have been published about the attack, detailing the extent of the leak as well as the contents of some files. These have included unreleased scripts, “greenlight studies,” contact details for celebrities and employees, financial data, and documents related to ongoing litigation. Notably, five Sony Pictures movies were released through file-sharing sites, including some unreleased films.
Sony has already attempted to combat the leaks caused by the “Guardians of Peace” or GOP by performing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on known servers, and attempting to damage torrents by sharing dummy files.
Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton spoke to employees about the attack in two meetings earlier today, reports Variety. Lynton was confident about the studio’s ability to outlive the attack, claiming “This will not take us down. You should not be worried about the future of this studio.”
Angry at the hackers responsible, Lynton claimed that “innocent people” were victims of the assault, referring to the 47,000 current and past studio employees who had their personal details leaked. Though each meeting lasted approximately 20 minutes, neither included the opportunity for staff to ask Lynton questions about the attack, nor any future plans Sony Pictures may have to repair its reputation.
Over the weekend, it was discovered an external audit of company security at Sony Pictures was lacking, with more than 100 devices unmonitored after the studio transitioned between a private security firm to an internal team. Despite the research performed by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in September, and ironically released as part of one data dump by the GOP, Sony Pictures apparently did not do enough to repair its corporate network to mitigate the attack.
The GOP claims it will be releasing “more interesting” data as a “Christmas Gift,” and has offered employees to “opt out” their information from the data release by emailing the group.
