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.
This is bad news for Sony Pictures, not just because of the volume of information leaked or its sensitive nature. It's a clear indication that Sony Pictures, one of the major studios, did a completely piss-poor job with securing its data. Some people think that North Korea is behind the attack as a way to retaliate against The Interview, a Sony Pictures film about killing Kim Jong-Un. But now hackers everywhere know that Sony Pictures, for one, sucks at cyber security. Who will be the hackers' next victim? [Fusion]