The horrendous hack of Sony Corp. and release of internal documents falls under the journalistic gaze of Peter Elkind in the July 1 issue. Titled, "Inside the Hack of the Century," the 12,000-word story was called one of the magazine's most important ever by Fortune editor Alan Murray. The article appeared in three parts online. Early in the piece Elkind writes,
Three weeks later—starting at about 7 a.m. Pacific time on Monday, Nov. 24—a crushing cyberattack was launched on Sony Pictures. Employees logging on to its network were met with the sound of gunfire, scrolling threats, and the menacing image of a fiery skeleton looming over the tiny zombified heads of the studio’s top two executives.
Before Sony’s IT staff could pull the plug, the hackers’ malware had leaped from machine to machine throughout the lot and across continents, wiping out half of Sony’s global network. It erased everything stored on 3,262 of the company’s 6,797 personal computers and 837 of its 1,555 servers. To make sure nothing could be recovered, the attackers had even added a little extra poison: a special deleting algorithm that overwrote the data seven different ways. When that was done, the code zapped each computer’s startup software, rendering the machines brain-dead.
From the moment the malware was launched—months after the hackers first broke in—it took just one hour to throw Sony Pictures back into the era of the Betamax. The studio was reduced to using fax machines, communicating through posted messages, and paying its 7,000 employees with paper checks.
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