The son of a German Jew who served in British intelligence during World War II, Mr. Lynton, 54, had weathered past corporate crises, including an inherited accounting scandal when he ran the Penguin publishing house and a recent attempt by the activist investor Daniel S. Loeb to force change at Sony. But neither of those episodes matched the complexity and surreal twists of the hacking, which ultimately became a test of national will, a referendum on media behavior and a defense of free expression, even of the crudest sort.

“What it amounted to was criminal extortion,” Mr. Lynton said in an interview.

Rising Sense of Urgency

By Dec. 1, a week after Sony discovered the breach, a sense of urgency and horror had penetrated the studio. More than a dozen F.B.I. investigators were setting up shop on the Culver City lot and in a separate Sony facility near the Los Angeles airport called Corporate Pointe, helping Sony deal with one of the worst cyberattacks ever on an American company.

Mountains of documents had been stolen, internal data centers had been wiped clean, and 75 percent of the servers had been destroyed.

Everything and anything had been taken. Contracts. Salary lists. Film budgets. Medical records. Social Security numbers. Personal emails. Five entire movies, including the yet-to-be-released “Annie.”

Later, it would become apparent through files stolen by the hackers and published online that Mr. Lynton and Ms. Pascal had been given an oblique warning. On Nov. 21, in an email signed by “God’s Apstls,” the studio was told to pay money for an unspecified reason by Nov. 24. If the studio did not comply, the bizarre missive said, “Sony Pictures will be bombarded as a whole.”

But the warning either did not find its way to Mr. Lynton or he missed its importance in the daily flood of messages to his inbox. In the first days of the attack, responsibility for which was claimed by a group calling itself “Guardians of Peace,” the notion of North Korean involvement was little more than a paranoid whisper.

In June, a spokesman for North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement said the country would take “a decisive and merciless countermeasure” if the United States government permitted Sony to make its planned Christmas release of the comedy “The Interview.”