Here's a jaded take on the Sony hack:

Imagine you want to purge a toxic attitude from your company. So you do some over-the-counter hacking which frames some plausible bad guy with an ostensible attack to sabotage some internal venture. Meanwhile, as part of the hackers' data dump, they release documents naming and shaming the people in the company with the negative attitude.

This lets you safely expose the negative team members while advertising that 'controversial' product. Think of it as a modern Jerry Maguire.