Sony: It Is Not Our Broken System, It’s The Internet’s Fault

Howard Stringer, the disgraced CEO of Sony (NYSE: SNE), made the remarkably disingenuous or perhaps naive comment that all Internet systems have the same weaknesses as the hacked PlayStation network.

“It’s the beginning, unfortunately, or the shape of things to come,” said  Stringer to the WSJ, “It’s not a brave new world; it’s a bad new world.” And, it is. Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Gmail system was hacked in China. Federal government servers have been the targets of hackers who probably wanted access to confidential information.

What Stringer is doing is a rhetorical sleight of hand. He is arguing that Sony cannot take care of its own problem because of a larger systematic one.  That’s nonsense, of course.

Remember, Sony’s servers were compromised and not those of competitors like Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) or Nintendo, which highlights the weakness of Stringer’s argument. These two companies may have more secure networks, or they may have been lucky. But, bad luck is not an excuse for business failure, or, if it is then good IT management does not mean much.

There have been news reports that Sony’s systems were vulnerable because they worked on servers operated by Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN). Hackers worked into machines on the same server systems which ran the Sony network. It was an easy jump to the Sony infrastructure. Clever, malicious, and anonymous software engineers used that vulnerabilities to bring the Sony system down.

Ultimately, Sony is responsible for its own systems just as car companies are for their engineering and manufacturing and toy companies are for the safety of their products. It is cynical for Stringer to blame Sony’s problems on an evolving tech world that poses a danger to all the companies that use it.

Douglas A. McIntyre