Sony postpones earnings following North Korea hack over The Interview film
Yet another revelation has come from Sony in connection with a massive hacking of its computers. This time it's not celebrity secrets being spilled.
The firm said it will delay publication of its third quarter results, which were due to be published on 16 February, after suffering a significant and high-profile cyber attack, thought to be orchestrated by North Korea over the Seth Rogan and James Franco film The Interview in which the country's leader was made fun of.
The firm said its financial and accounting technology was still not up and running in the wake of the attack and will be unable to complete its financial statements and accounts until the end of March.
Here are the full reasons Sony has given for delaying the results as it deals with the aftermath of the hack, revealing that some of its systems are still offline two months later and much of its transactional data will have to be manually entered and checked.
As a result of the cyber attack, which has been now recognized as a highly sophisticated and damaging cyber attack, a serious disruption of SPE’s network systems occurred, including the destruction of network hardware and the compromise of a large amount of data on these systems. In response to this cyber attack, SPE shut down its entire network.
Since that time, SPE has worked aggressively to restore these systems. However, most of SPE’s 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. After the restoration of these applications, SPE will immediately commence the actions necessary to close its third quarter financial statements.
However, even with the anticipated restoration of these applications in early February 2015, SPE will not have sufficient time to close its financial statements in time for submission of the quarterly securities report in the middle of February 2015. SPE must then enter transactional data for the two-month period the systems were offline and perform verification procedures over the restored data. For these reasons, Sony expects that it cannot complete its preparation, including the review by our independent accountants, of its consolidated financial statements for the third quarter of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2015, by February 16, 2015, the original deadline for submission of the quarterly securities report for this third quarter. Accordingly Sony has filed an application with the FSA for approval to extend the deadline for submission of the report to March 31, 2015.
Considering the current status, Sony expects that it can complete its preparation of its financial statements as described above and submit the quarterly securities report for the third quarter by March 31, 2015.