Business leader: the hacking of Sony Pictures and its embarrassing revelations are a lesson for all companies given that hacking can only get worse

The hack of Sony Pictures gets worse and worse, in publicity terms. One day it’s the revelation of gender pay gaps; another it’s the awful internal presentations used to discuss film marketing; on another, emails between studio executives deriding Barack Obama. It’s a PR car crash from which the company might never recover.

It’s easy to think that Sony has somehow brought this on itself; that the foibles of its parent are the root cause, after it blocked attempts to make its PlayStation console easier for enthusiasts to program, and in 2005 went as far as silently installing software on PCs of people who tried to “rip” Sony-BMG CDs to their digital collections.

But the real lesson of the Sony hack is that it could happen to any company that doesn’t focus heavily on its security. And the effects can be destructive. News organisations (including the FT, Daily Telegraph, Associated Press, Washington Post and, yes, this one) have been embarrassed by the antics of the hacker group Syrian Electronic Army; but the harm only extended to social media reputations, which were soon cleared up.

The threat that Sony is waking up to is that a hacker systematically worked through the entire organisation’s computer network with untrammelled access, and is now – either as a prelude to extortion, or revenge – releasing the contents. “They’re shooting the hostages,” as Sean Sullivan of the online security company F-Secure puts it.

Security companies themselves don’t assume they’re safe. “I assume someday we will be hacked,” commented Rich Mogull, of security company Securosis, on Twitter. “Also, not perfect, but [I] try and only write [in email] what I’d tell someone to their face.”

What security companies call the “threat landscape” is very different now even from a couple of years ago. The FBI reckons that the Sony attack would have been hard for even a government to defend.

Sony’s staff took the radical step of using pen and paper when their computer network was wrecked. Perhaps the future of internal corporate communication lies beyond email – in apps like Slack, secure messaging, and so on. Or – more radically – perhaps people will start talking to each other more often. But whichever it is, the reality is that the hackers are not going away. Sony won’t be the last to suffer.