Sony: The Company That Kicked the Hornet's Nest

There's an Internet phenomenon called the Streisand Effect. It happens when a person or company tries to suppress a piece of information and, in so doing, unintentionally popularizes it. It bears the name of Barbra Streisand because of her unsuccessful 2003 lawsuit attempting to remove photographs of her Malibu home from the Web—which of course had people flocking to the site that hosted the pictures.

In the future, a blowback in the realm of cybersecurity might be known as the Sony Effect. The Japanese conglomerate is still dealing with the fallout from an April hacking incident that targeted its PlayStation and Sony Online Entertainment networks, which some 100 million people use to play video games, watch movies, and listen to music online. The attack resulted in the second-largest data breach in U.S. history, exposing records including credit-card numbers and forcing Sony (SNE) to pull the plug on the networks indefinitely. (Sony hopes to have them back online by the end of May.) A full accounting of the disaster, both in dollar terms and in damage to the PlayStation brand, will take months, if not years.