SONY HACK – INVESTMENT IMPLICATIONS. YOU ‘AINT SEEN ANYTHING YET FOLKS: NEEDED: A NEW DEFENSE SECTOR

The attack on Sony by N.Korea.The FBI and IT experts have been crawling all over Sony, and have concluded that this was a very advanced attack, which 90% of US corporations would not have been able to repel.Apart from the obvious concerns about the current insecurity of IT farms on or off the Cloud, it raises the spectre of a N.Korea's with unexpectedly sophisticated tech prowess.And what about the abilities and intentions of Russia, Israel, China, Iran and of course the US as well as of brilliant wildcat individual hackers?The scene is set for many more Sony's to come in the form of revenge attacks and not just from N.Korea.Needed: the creation of a new defense sector to defend us against what exponential technology change has wrought.So IT security has to rise to the very top of the IT agenda and a lot more money has to be spent.IT service giants such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and HP will need to beef up their IT security offerings.More resources and brains have to go into developing smarts in such areas as predictive analytics and low frequency data.In prospect, of a fast growing and now high profile sub-set of ITAnd that spells looking to invest in a new breed of vanguard companies likeBarracuda , FireEye< and Palo Alto Networks helping to create the new defense industry.Each has handily outperformed the market indices of late with more to come as post Sony the story keeps in the headlines.Disclosure: The author has no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.

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