This is very scary. It would even increase their motivation to mine every possible bit of personalized data they can get on everybody to create personal profiles with health issues, preferences, tendencies, affiliations, etc.

The problem is that it doesn't just damage the entity "Sony", but also has had a large negative effect for the thousands of workers that have nothing to do with Sony's stupid decisions. Now about the attack itself, I strongly believe that this is a false flag operation. The blocking of the movie is caricaturesque in its purpose, it was certain that it would direct all the attention to North Korea. If you can organize such a high skilled attack you can and will also invest effort in covering your tracks and what's best than giving false leads. As a result of all the publicity that this attack got, the government will have green light to increase their investment on cyber offensive operations. If this was part of the original goal I don't know, but the attacker certainly knew that this would get the attention of everybody.

This is a clear indication that the government's and NSA's security concerns are absolutely misaligned with the interest of the population. They seem to serve imperialist ambitions. An indicator of concern for citizen's security would be to report such a vulnerability immediately and helping prevent the exploitation of the bugs by cyber criminals. That would be in the interest of national and international security.