Sony: It's Time To Declare War

Karl T. Muth suggests Sony can fight back.

I've advised companies in serious, bet-the-company situations. I suggest that Sony is in such a situation: its decisions this week and over the coming weekend will come to define the company's posture as to North Korea and, perhaps most importantly, its reputation for crisis management. I haven’t yet been asked to advise Sony, so this blog is written with complete ignorance of any proprietary information or strategy.

If I were advising Sony, I would focus on one message: You are not helpless in this situation. I would then establish two things: 1) Sony is a geopolitical player in this situation and on par with a country; and 2) Sony could adopt, as part of its corporate mission from now on, the overthrow of North Korea’s government as a strategy objective. Sony's executive suite is obviously not just hurt and embarassed by recent leaks and threats, but understandably sees the business as being at risk from new actors. Sony can either roll with the proverbial punches or it can go on the offensive and declare war on the likely-DPRK-backed hacker terrorists.

Let's explore the tools at the ready if Sony became serious about a counter-strike against North Korea. If Sony were interested in overthrowing the North Korean government, it could at least take steps toward accomplishing this goal through three means:

First, it could open a channel (start, for instance, with a 10-wide block of Tor-like servers run on Sony’s PlayStation PSN backbone, which has plenty of spare server cycles and bandwidth associated with it) making all sorts of content available free to the residents of North Korea through more-easily-accessible IP addresses (I’d begin with documentaries about how awful life is in North Korea and news reports from other Asian countries translated). As part of this "media accessibility campaign" it could distribute free streaming copies of "The Interview" around the world along with other films not-so-loved by the not-so-beloved leaders of North Korea. Next, Sony could offer a cash prize, funded by Sony, for everyone who escaped North Korea – a prize large enough and well enough secretly promoted to get hordes of North Koreans to overrun undertrained, underpaid, and underquipped border guards like a bad zombie film. Sony could create a reality show around the prize, perhaps also funding academic scholarships for the children of those who have fled North Korea and doing other things to encourage defection. And Sony has the cellular technology to get messages into North Korea, now that mobile phones are (finally) available to exactly the class of North Koreans who may have the access needed to spread subversive messages and sabotage government infrastructure. To reach other North Koreans, I'd build Sony-owned high-power broadcast radio antennas near the border and broadcast news of Sony-funded game-show-like prizes for escaping, including houses in tropical locations and so on. Third, and perhaps most aggressively, Sony could offer cash bounties for the destruction of certain pieces of key North Korean military infrastructure, starting with the radio towers near China that the government depends upon (but reportedly poorly protects). Included in this bounty strategy could be cash for hackers inside North Korea willing to turn against their government and sabotage government systems, destroy important data, and so on.

The war between the North Korean government and Sony should be neither unilateral nor unidirectional. And there is no reason it can't or shouldn't include Sony’s incentivizing defection, sabotage, and disloyalty within North Korea. To expect Sony to sit idly by and simply accept the compromise of its key systems and proprietary data is not a tenable position. Sony earned nearly 2 trillion yen in the second quarter of 2014 (up from 1.8 trillion in the second quarter of 2013). It is, from a cash-flow and cash-management standpoint, wealthier than North Korea. Sony needs to stop being the self-appointed victim in this situation when it can be the aggressor - this is a case where the proverbial best defense may actually be a good offense. This is Sony’s moment to be a hero and to do what Western governments have been too cowardly to do: Threaten North Korea directly. It has the engineering resources and technological ability to sabotage North Korea’s infrastructure substantially, including systems from military communications to electrical grid to switch-level utility access. Most importantly, it has the financial resources to create disloyalty within North Korea and turn North Korea's politicized refugee diaspora into a group of Sony-sponsored celebrities.

To go on the offensive, Sony must recognise, and rise to fill, its role as a geopolitical actor in this scenario. It should not defer to the governments of the United States or Japan in plotting its next move. Instead, it should strike against North Korea and strike hard, using its advantages: technological ability and cash in the bank. If Sony wants to counter North Korea's attacks on its systems, it should poison whatever software or technological resources are available over accessible networks and it should pay as many North Koreans as possible to betray their country, sabotage their workplaces, and implicate their direct superiors. In exchange for this disloyalty, Sony can easily offer key North Koreans in a briefcase what they’d struggle to earn in two decades. In my view, taking on the hackers (and those funding them) is not only the right thing to do for Sony in terms of defending itself as a company, but the right thing to do on behalf of Western companies and their shareholders around the world. Anything but an immediate and severe response risks setting the precedent that it is consequenceless to attack major companies.

In short, the message must be loud and clear: If you try to intimidate a corporation like Sony, the Western world will not only tolerate, but endorse, state-like action and reprisals by that corporation. Sony’s response to North Korea's provocations should be brief and simple: molon labe.