Sony CEO says breach won’t affect financial results

Kazuo Hirai, Sony’s chief executive and president, has made the surprise claim that the cyber attack it suffered in November will have little bearing on the company’s financials.

Speaking to reporters at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas recently, Hirai said he put pen to paper on every decision made by Sony Pictures that came as a result of the data breach. The issue saw the firm lose thousands of documents filled with confidential information, and caused performance cancellations of much talked about movie The Interview, which saw film stars James Franco and Seth Rogen as journalists with a CIA assignment to kill Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea.

Sony Pictures claims that the movie – which cost £29m to produce – has seen £20.5m in revenue from satellite, cable, and online sales. It has also earned a further £3.3m at close to 600 cinemas airing the movie in the US.

Company85’s head of privacy services and security, Phil Cracknell, told SCMagazineUK.com:

“Without knowing the exact details of the remediation work that Hirai signed off, it makes sense that after an organisation has had a public breach that the senior leadership are compelled to act, so Sony should be a more resilient and secure network environment providing the improvements address any lessons learned from the attack.”

The Sony breach is perhaps the highest profile cyber attack from a number of recent incidents. It also serves as a great lesson to any company that holds confidential data. Cyber security is a hot topic at the moment, and for good reason. Businesses would certainly be well advised to pay more attention to their IT security recruitment policy.