Sony to delay earnings report as result of hacking attacks

PanARMENIAN.Net - Sony said Friday, Jan 23 that it would delay the report of its earnings for the quarter ended Dec. 31 as a result of the hacking attacks on its American film studio, Sony Pictures Entertainment, according to NYT Bits.

As those attacks led to public discussions about cybersecurity and geopolitics, and Hollywood’s relation with the two — and as the story moved from Sony to North Korea to the National Security Agency — it might have been easy to forget the scale of the disruption at the studio.

In a filing to the Financial Services Agency of Japan, the company said that after Sony Pictures shut down its entire computer network in response to the November intrusions, many crucial programs still were not running.

Sony Pictures’ “financial and accounting applications and many other critical information technology applications will not be functional until early February 2015 due to the amount of destruction and disruption that occurred, and the care necessary to avoid further damage by prematurely restarting functions,” the company said in the filing.

As a result, Sony is asking for an extension of a month and a half for its earnings report, though it said it would hold a call on Feb 4 to update analysts and investors on its operations outlook.

The announcement comes as cybersecurity remains one of the hot topics at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where executives have been expressing concerns about the growing list of corporations that have been the victims of major attacks.

In particular, the attacks on Sony have set off alarms because they were designed not simply to steal data and make money, but to embarrass and disrupt the operations of the company.

Even though Sony will most likely have few concrete numbers to give investors on the Feb. 4 call, many analysts and investors will no doubt be dialing in, curious about the last line of Sony’s filing on Friday: “While Sony continues to evaluate the impact of the cyberattack on its financial results, it currently believes that such impact is not material.”