GottaNew

British tabloids went predictably nuts this weekend when it emerged Princess Beatrice Elizabeth Mary of York, the fifth grandchild of The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh, has been working at Sony Pictures since the start of the year. They hadn’t seen any leaked data, but Forbes can now confirm there is a salary of £19,500, an address and other employee details belonging to a “York, Beatrice” amongst the reams of information dumped online by the Guardians of Peace since the attacks on Sony started in late November.

The data is almost certainly related to the princess, given her named manager is Andrea Wong, president of international production, who heads up the London office, and the address listed is in Windsor, Berkshire, famously the home town of the royals. Her start date of 13 January also matches up with media reports of her beginnings at the firm.

What’s rather heartwarming is that Princess Beatrice’s salary is rated as low, at least in the market comparison column in the leaked spreadsheet. Her role is listed as “Intermed Coord, Prod”, which I’m assuming means intermediate coordinating producer, unless someone in the Sony HR department was guilty of a typo. If she is, however, an intern as noted in newspaper reports in January, many would consider that salary rather high, in a market where most interns get paid pittance. And Beatrice is sixth in line to the throne so is unlikely to ever struggle financially.

Your reporter tried to get hold of the Buckingham Palace press team to disclose the findings, but was told the media department wasn’t open on weekends. As Sony apparently hasn’t been in touch with those outside the company who were affected by the breach, I contacted a handful of them. One, whose CV was leaked (she didn’t get the job), said it was “a bit shocking”. Another, who has now left the company to work for another studio, said he was “not happy”. As noted in a previous Forbes report on the reams of social security, passport and credit card numbers, there’s a lot of personal data here that cyber criminals would love to get their hands on to steal identities and, subsequently, people’s money.

Meanwhile, Sony’s employees have been sent a threatening email, according to various reports. It claims to come from the GOP hackers, but it could be anyone who dowloaded the masses of information. North Korea remains the number one suspect, as technical details have linked it to other attacks connected with the socialist state. DPRK officials had previously denounced Sony film “The Interview”, a “comedy” about two men asked to assassinate leader Kim Jong-Un.

The latest discovery of a royal’s data in the Sony files will likely only add to the embarrassment – it’s already been left red-faced by the discovery of a file called “passwords” in which passwords were stored in plain text.


the source