Sony CEO defends company’s response to attacks; European users get access to identity theft protection
Sony’s CEO, Sir Howard Stringer, has finally broken the silence and publicly defended Sony’s response time to the recent well-publicised attacks on its PlayStation Network servers by hackers that forced the consumer electronics giant to suspend its online
network for almost an entire month.
Sony came under criticism for its slow response to the attack and how it was hesitant to publicly reveal any details of the attack or what information was actually stolen by the cyber criminals, earlier reported to have been carried out by a group of hackers
known as ‘anonymous’, who promptly denied they were the ones responsible.
Stringer defended Sony when he spoke to Reuters earlier on in the week and explained that the company’s response was swift and timely. He went on to explain that Sony went as far as to make the news public, a practice which according to him, not many other
companies would follow.
"This was an unprecedented attack, a lot of these breaches are never reported by companies or it takes companies a month," he said. "You're telling me my week wasn't fast enough?"
Sony shut down the PlayStation Network after the discovery that the attacks had taken place and called in a third party investigative team to ascertain who was responsible for the breach and what data in particular was stolen.
It is also reported that later on, Sony hired another company to assist as well due to the huge scale of the task.
Stringer responded to questions by journalists asking how much the PSN outage had cost Sony in terms of revenue, and the related cost the company had to bare, by honestly admitting that he did not have an exact figure.
"There's a charge for the system being down, a charge for identity theft protection. The charges mount up but there are no numbers yet,” Stringer said.
The PlayStation Network has since been restored with added security features to prevent further breaches and attacks and a ‘Welcome Back’ package has also been launched to reward the patience of its users and enticing them to keep using the PSN and other
Sony products.
It allows users to download two free games of their choice from the selection made available as well as 30 free subscriptions to Sony’s premium online service, PlayStation Plus.
At the same time, Sony is offering its PSN users in Europe an identity theft protection facility in an effort to both assure its users as well as rebuild some of the trust lost during the saga.
Users from each European region can avail the service by visiting the fraudprotect website and selecting their region, with no minimum age limit restriction on users.
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