Sony Cyber Attack Breaks New Ground

More news keeps tumbling in the wake of the recent cyber attack at Sony Pictures Entertainment—Sony’s second major hacker attack in three years—and it’s not good.

The fact that the breach has exposed employee information ranging from salaries to medical records to social security numbers to home addresses, not to mention five yet-to-be-released Sony movies, causing a major shutdown of the company’s computer systems, appears to break new ground.

First up, the Wall Street Journal says the attack revealed far more personal information than previously believed, including the social security numbers of more than 47,000 former employees along with Hollywood celebrities like Sylvester Stallone.

According to the WSJ:

An analysis of 33,000 Sony documents by data security firm Identity Finder LLC found personal data, including salaries and home addresses, posted online for people who stopped working at Sony Pictures as far back as 2000 and one who started in 1955.”

And:

Much of the data analyzed by Identity Finder was stored in Microsoft Excel files without password protection.”

Aren’t most businesses run in Excel?

A well-timed piece over at the New York Times Bits Blog makes the point that companies that continue to rely on prevention and detection technologies, such as firewalls and antivirus products, are considered sitting ducks for cyber attacks.

Bits Blog cites Richard A. Clarke, the first cybersecurity czar at the White House, who says:

It’s almost impossible to think of a company that hasn’t been hacked—the Pentagon’s secret network, the White House, JPMorgan—it is pretty obvious that prevention and detection technologies are broken.”

So what approaches are working?

According to the Bits Blog post, experts say the companies best prepared for online attacks are those that have identified their most valuable assets, like Boeing’s blueprints to the next generation of stealth bomber or Target’s customer data.

Those companies take additional steps to protect that data by isolating it from the rest of their networks and encrypting it.”

Breach detection plans and more secure authentication schemes, in addition to existing technologies, are the key to being better prepared.

Insurance too, is seen as a vital preparedness step.

Earlier this week, a top U.S. regulator said banks should consider cyber insurance to protect themselves from the growing financial impact in the wake of cyber attacks.

Let’s hope companies take heed.

As of December 2, the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that 2014 has seen 708 data breaches, exposing 85.1 million records (this list includes the Sony attack, listing the number of records exposed at 7,500).

Those figures are even higher than 2013, when the total number of data breaches and records exposed, soared.

More on the potential fallout and growing identity theft threat facing consumers here.