“The trust has been broken and it’s been very, very publicly broken.”
That’s what Algonquin’s former head of information technology had to say about the Sony hack in an interview with the Times.
This past November, Sony Pictures Entertainment joined the exclusive list of organizations who in recent years have been maliciously hacked, in direct response to the anticipated release of their movie The Interview last month.
This incident continued to escalate, as the United States have now levied sanctions against the North Korean government as well as North Korea having their own internet shut off for nine hours.
And it’s just the beginning.
“What happened in Sony is a real shift into how information is being exploited,” Chief Information Officer Stephen Abraham said. “Imagine Sony as an organization that keeps track of all the busy emails that’s handled internally and all the communications, presentations, spreadsheets and financial information that’s been in the organization to make it right. When people create information like that, we think that it’s going to be kept private.”
The leaked documents include a list of employee salaries and bonuses, social security numbers and birth dates, HR employee performance reviews, criminal background checks as well as scripts for unreleased movies and TV shows. This includes an unreleased pilot by award-winning screenwriter Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad.
However, on Dec. 23, Sony announced that they would release the film after initial comments that they will not release the movie at all. The Interview was shown at several hundred theaters and was streamed to over two million viewers online.
Abraham has been a part of the IT field for over 30 years, and has been a Chief Information Officer for the past 10 years. He began his career as a CIO at Algonquin College, where he was also the director of the IT program. Currently, Abraham is the CIO of the Medical Council of Canada. Through this period of time, he witnessed the evolution of his profession and has understood his new role in the field.
“It used to be that CIOs were mostly concerned about the public relations problems that occurred from a security breach,” Abraham said. “But what’s happened here brings it to a whole other level, because you now see the possibility through blackmail that a hacker could force a company to do something they otherwise wouldn’t do because they are threatening to share data.”
But the reason Sony received so much backlash by hackers for this film was not from its content, rather its graphic representation of its characters. Specifically, the hacker group identified the scene of Kim Jong-Un’s gory death as the most critical part of the movie.
“I think it was a marketing scheme,” engineering student Koutaiba Dekis said on the death scene. “In our world anything can be done to create conflict. I think it was done to make people more interested in the movie.”
So what can be done for the future?
“I would suggest that they (students) understand the security stance of the organization they are going to be working for,” Abraham said. “More importantly, when they are working for a company to keep their personal business at home.”
“It’s a wake-up call for what the impact could be if they don’t properly secure information,” Abraham continued. “This is bigger than anything we’ve ever seen before.”