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FBI warned of a Sony-style hack in a report last year
The Sony Pictures hack and its resulting fallout may have caught many people by surprise, but not the FBI -- it apparently suspected for months that something like this might happen. The Intercept has obtained a December 2013 agency report warning that it was just a matter of time before a US company faced a "data-destruction attack" like the one that hit Sony, where malware deletes enough data to render systems unusable. The alert was meant for "critical infrastructure" organizations (like energy providers) and never reached Sony, but the scenario was apparently very similar to what the company would face a year later. Intercept's tipsters even believe that Sony could have avoided a lot of the resulting damage if it had been aware of the report and heeded its advice on defending against hacks of this nature.
