One year after a hack crippled Sony Pictures and exposed a string of insulting emails about some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities, company CEO Michael Lynton explained what he had learned from the cyber attack.
Speaking at Business Insider’s Ignition conference, Lynton explained that one lesson from the attack, which leaked internal e-mails, was to not be so reliant on that technology for communication.
“Inevitably there’s a lot of things that should be kept to a phone conversation, particularly when it’s sensitive,” he said.
David Brancaccio, host of “Marketplace Morning Report,” moderated the talk and asked if there’s been a change in e-mail behavior at Sony since the hack.
“Yeah, I think people are a little bit more moderate in the way they are expressing themselves generally,” Lynton said. “But you get back to business as usual and I’m sure people have started saying things that probably they shouldn’t.”
Lynton then laughed and added, “It is the entertainment business.”
Last December, a massive cyber attack linked to the North Korean government crashed computer systems and leaked films along with e-mails at the studio.
The hackers, known as “The Guardians of Peace,” also made threats of violence regarding the release of Sony’s “The Interview,” a comedy about a plot to kill North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-Un.
This caused theaters to pull out of showing the film, forcing the studio to release the film online, which Lynton said was not a “good test case” for how films may be released in the future.
“Despite that fact we did a very large number, it’s not clear to me that this is… the way you would do it,” Lynton said. “You would do it in a much more organized way.”
Lynton added that the experience with “The Interview” did teach some valuable lessons for where the industry may be going.
“We did learn that you can get to a very big number in a very short space of time even with all those factors in place,” he said. “So it does suggest that something is there.”
