https://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2014/12/19/the-morning-risk-report-sony-debacle-starts-new-age-of-cyber-risk/
Risk & Compliance Journal.
The Morning Risk Report: Sony Debacle Starts New Age of Cyber Risk
Joel Schectman
BiographyJoel Schectman
@joel_schectman
joel.schectman@wsj.com
Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.'s cancelling of the release of "The Interview," after a devastating attack on its servers, signals the beginning of a dangerous new period of cyber risk, with experts fearing that hackers will become more successful at hijacking major business decisions.
In the past, hacker attacks usually meant stolen data, resulting in expensive breach notifications, harm to companies' reputations and class-action law suits from customers. But even the largest attacks, like last year's assault on Target, haven't caused companies to fearfully retreat from major investments. Cyber risk experts say they have only just begun to grasp how the incident will affect future threat calculus."Before today, the losses were the costs of doing a forensic investigation, breach notifications," said Paul Ferrillo , a cyber risk specialist at the law firm Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP. "Companies weren't thinking about 'what if my wind turbines go down, what happens if I can't show my movie." And few have plans in place to handle such major business disruptions.
What made the hacker onslaught against Sony so damaging was the combination of terroristic threats against customers and the release of personal data about company executives themselves. The effectiveness of that campaign is already sending chills through corporate boardrooms, who fear that cyber attackers have set a precedent that could soon be repeated. The incident "empowers hackers to influence business decisions at publicly traded corporations," said Alba Alessandro, an attorney at Hodgson Russ LLP, specializing in cyber liability. "And that's very dangerous territory."
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