Behind the scenes at Sony as hacking crisis unfolded

The day after Sony Pictures employees discovered that company email was unusable following a cyberattack, senior executives came up with an old-style communication network: a phone tree, in which updates on the hack were relayed from person to person. With computers and landline phones down during, the Sony Corp. studio’s 6,000 employees were forced to improvise, with cellphones, Gmail accounts and notepads. The payroll department dug up an old machine to cut paychecks manually. Before long, the studio unearthed a cache of BlackBerrys, which still worked because they send and receive email via their own servers. Sony executives consulted with think tanks and government officials during pre-production of “The Interview”, but they said they never considered the potential for direct retribution.

It took me 24 or 36 hours to fully understand this was not something we were going to be able to recover from in the next week or two.

Michael Lynton, Sony Entertainment chief executive

While the studio has been closed for the holidays, studio CEO Michael Lynton has been personally pursuing deals for wider distribution of “The Interview” in theaters and online, negotiations that normally fall to executives several levels beneath him. Over the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday break, the IT department scrambled to get basic systems like email back online. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation worked nearby, as did investigators from FireEye Inc., a cybersecurity company that deploys Ghostbusters-like teams to companies that have been hacked. Kevin Mandia, FireEye’s chief operating officer, called the confluence of stolen credentials, erased hard drives, and leaked documents at Sony unprecedented in the history of corporate cyberhacks.

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