write recommendations for the organization and how your proposed solutions will reduce business risks and financial damage.ON THE WORD FILE YOU NEED TO ADD THE EXTRA 4 PAGESAND IN THE PNG FILE ARE THE TYPE OF RECOMMENDATIONSYOUNEED TO MAKE.you can add graphics or images to the file
Surname 1 Mejia 7 Company Background Sony corporation is a Japanese multinational company based in Tokyo, Konan, and Minato. Sony is among the globally known electronic brand. The company began in 1946 as Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation with a starting capital of 200,000 yen that later relocated to Shinagawa, Tokyo (Sullivan 25). The specialty of the company is diverse, including professional and consumer electronics, gaming, and entertainment. The company has gradually grown from humble roots to an established multinational company. The company started from a tape player to the Walkman to the current OLED television. The traditional operations of Sony cooperative have grown through innovation and has been profitable for more than 60 years. The vision of Sony is to fill the world with emotion using technology and creativity. Sony is guided by various values, including dreams and curiosity, diversity, integrity and sincerity, and sustainability. Sony pursues the creation of the best by connecting diversity and varying viewpoints. The company believes in earning trust from consumers through responsible and ethical conduct and disciplined ethical conduct. Organizational Structure The organizational structure of Sony rotates around the growing pressure in the gaming, entertainment, and electronics markets. The design of its architecture reflects the criteria used in the determination of the positions and roles of its employees and to adapt to the changing innovations in the industry. Sony's corporate structure supports the improvement to cater to the increasing competition from rival companies and global market situations. Sony corporation contains a balanced matrix of organizational structure that is primarily based on the effectiveness of the various business segments for the profitability development of innovative products in the market. Various executives head different sectors such as R&D, business development, energy and business, and the storage media departments. Sony's organization is based on various features such as function-based groups, geographic and business type divisions. In terms of the functions, it has the CEO, finance, R&D, legal and external relations, engineering, and HR to support functional efficacy. In the business division, the company sustains its division according to the type of product. Primarily, the segments include devices and games, music, storage media, home entertainment, and mobile communications. Sony's least concentrates on the geographical distribution in its business. However, it uses the geographic divisions to plan, finance, and establish strategic decisions. The primary geographic divisions include Japan, Europe, Asia-pacific, United States, China, and other regions. The primary advantage of Sony's Corporation is flexibility. The connections between the divisions assist the company is focusing on the different products and maintaining innovation as a growth strategy in the company. Sony strengthened its systems after the 2011 breach on its PlayStation network that resulted in the loss of 77 million user accounts. However, hardening primarily focused on the firewalls to monitor the threats and continuously updating the system to detect the changing security signatures. The Hack On December 17th, 2014, Sony announced that it had canceled the release of the comedy movie, The Interview following controversy about its content (Daugirdas and Julian 419). The comedy movie highlights that two journalists are recruited to eliminate a North Korean leader. The decision to cancel the release of the film was associated with a unique breach into Sony's networks as well as threats directed towards movie theaters that show the film. On Monday, November 24th, at 7 AM Pacific Standard Time (PST), Sony picture systems were attacked. The malware used by the hackers infected the system successfully, affecting the Sony global network; however, the IT team was not able to contain the attack. The malware had an algorithm that overwrote and stole the data in seven different ways, complicating the recovery process by the Sony IT team. After one hour, the malware had taken and formatted data in 3263 PCs and 837 servers. However, Sony was able to save 3535 personal computers and 728 servers by entirely shutting down the system and stopped the spread of the malware (Zetter 2014). The hackers threatened to disclose sensitive company information, including personally identifiable information concerning both customers and employees such as names, addresses, financial, emails, unreleased movies, privacy websites as well as social security information. Consequently, investigations by the FBI indicated that the attackers had infiltrated Sony Corp. network systems several days before they initiated the attack. Who and Why The Guardians of Peace (GOP) claimed responsibility for the attack against Sony systems (Zetter 2014). Later, the FBI placed blame to the North Korean government for the hack, de facto citing Guardians of Peace as a government-sponsored unit. The technical analysis of the malware by the FBI indicated considerable similarities with that used by the Korean government in 2013, such as the encryption algorithms, overwrite method, codes, and compromised network (Haggard 2015). Additionally, the FBI established that the IP address for North Korea was hardcoded in the overwrite malware that was used to destroy Sony Corp.'s personal computers. The features of the malware attack against Sony reflected several similarities with the attack against South Korean banks and media companies in 2013. The report by the FBI was unique since the US state agency had never before solely associated a cyber-attack to a state. The interview is a comedy movie produced by Sony, about journalists who traveled to North Korea with a primary mission to assassinate Kim Jong U. The North Korean government complained about the movie for over a month and demanded the show be stopped with immediate effect since it promotes terrorism. Moreover, it previously had sent a letter to the United Nations concerning the contents of the movie. Despite the FBI and the media claiming the motives of the attackers stems from North Korean outrage about a movie, which many found unreasonable. Financial implications of the Breach Following the attack, Sony Corp. was reduced to using fax machines and old blackberry phones to communicate through messages and pay employees paper checks. The leaked information caused public embarrassment and increased worries concerning the identity theft of Sony employees, which suffered litigation from previous employees for failure to properly secure their networks. Sony suffered big losses from the attack, losing movie profits from The Interview. The attack by Guardians of Peace on Sony's movie studios, including leaked scripts of Mall Cop: Blart 2, Goosebumps, and The Wedding Ringer, had a detrimental financial impact on the company (Zetter 2014). Furthermore, GOP released critical marketing studies that include information about the adaptation of the Angry Birds Movie and the underlying principle for making or not making a movie. Hence, this would compromise their marketing campaigns since their critical information was made available to its competitors. Sony invested considerably in its movie studio to conduct new marketing studies. The company spent on computer repairs and replacement on the company's personal computers that were damaged. Moreover, they spend on conducting investigations on what happened to the confidential information and the measures they put in place to ensure that they would not reoccur in the future. The financial information relating to the vendor contracts was also leaked, which affected their power in negotiating a contract since the leaked information indicates how Sony is willing to pay a vendor in case they rent an asset for production. All of the information released impacted on Sony Corp had a financial implication, and they had to buy a computer and cybersecurity equipment to boost their security status. Consequently, leaked information impacted Sony employees as well as external parties that Sony spends time and money to contain the financial impact of the breach. Conclusion Organizations need to recognize the importance of cybersecurity and uphold defense against cyber-attacks. The presence of robust security control can stop some of the attacks. Sony announced that it had canceled the release of the comedy movie, The Interview, following controversy about its content. The comedy movie highlights that two journalists are recruited to eliminate a North Korean leader. The decision to cancel the release of the movie was associated with a unique breach into Sony's networks as well as threats directed towards movie theaters that show the movie. Sony's breach and the controversial movie The Interview prompted critical questions concerning the cyber defense strategies used by the company to ensure the safety of its private networks and information. Sony's breach reflects other big companies that spend big to strengthen their cyber-security. The malware was the biggest contributor to Sony's breach, where GOP deleted files in hundreds of computers and networks to render them useless. Works Cited Daugirdas, Kristina, and Julian Davis Mortenson. "United states responds to alleged North Korean cyber-attack on sony pictures entertainment." The American Journal of International Law 109.2 (2015): 419. Haggard, Stephan, and Jon R. Lindsay. "North Korea and the Sony hack: Exporting instability through cyberspace." (2015). http://hdl.handle.net/10125/36444 Sullivan, Clare. "The 2014 sony hack and the role of international law." Journal of National Security Law & Policy 8.3 (2016): 1-27. https://jnslp.com/2016/07/21/2014-sony-hack-role-international-law/. Accessed 6 March 2020 Zetter, Kim. "The Evidence That North Korea Hacked Sony Is Flimsy." Wired. com 17 (2014). from https://www.wired.com/2014/12/evidence-of-north-korea-hack-is-thin/. Accessed 6 March 2020