Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't tell from the OP and the previous story it linked to: is the spreadsheet of salaries and personal data straight from Sony's servers? Or is it a cracked database file that the hackers took time to convert to XLS for easier dissemination? I'm guessing the former, since the screenshots show the kind of spreadsheets that are lovingly hand-formatted and curated by the people tasked to maintain them.

It's kind of a fascinating look at how data is clumsily handled within corporations. I mean, how do they keep everything synced between the sheets that contain salaries/benefits, severance actions, etc.? (shudder)

View on HN

Bloomberg reports, "The incident began when a picture of a skull appeared on company computer screens, the entertainment website Deadline.com reported yesterday." [1].

Also, the Reddit thread which seems to have started the media firestorm was entitled, "I used to work for Sony Pictures. My friend still works there and sent me this. It's on every computer all over Sony Pictures nationwide." [2] (refers to this picture: https://imgur.com/qXNgFVz).

This leads me to believe that the attacker compromised most/all corporate desktops and exfiltrated data directly from those machines. No better place to get that spreadsheet than directly from the workstation of the employee who works on it daily!

[1]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-24/sony-corp-computers... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/2n9zhv/i_used_to_w...

>>I mean, how do they keep everything synced between the sheets that contain salaries/benefits, severance actions, etc.? (shudder)

From my years working with at&t's payroll system, Export-to-csv out of SAP(www.sap.com) to be manually looked at and/or imported into some other program was very common. If at&t were the target of this whole mess, I'd assume the Windows 2000 machines running crystal reports(www.crystalreports.com/) got compromised; which would generate very sensitive payroll files.

> It's kind of a fascinating look at how data is clumsily handled within corporations. I mean, how do they keep everything synced between the sheets that contain salaries/benefits, severance actions, etc.? (shudder)

Email, of course!

Companies love to use sharepoint for this. There's decent integration with MS Office, but it's still huge pain to use. Usually it involves multiple full time sharepoint "developers" to make it do what you want.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com