What will the impact of cyber attacks on Sony mean for the gaming industry
As everyone with a computer or a television may have heard, the Sony Corporation was recently attacked by a group of, as yet unknown, cyber criminals who hacked into their servers and stole the data of over a 100 million users.
Sony now faces a congressional hearing in front of the United States Congress. Kaz Hirai, Executive Vice President of Sony Corporation was asked to testify before a subcommittee and give a complete account of the attacks that targeted their servers.
Mr. Hirai did not make the trip but did answer all the questions asked by the subcommittee in detail. However, the Congressional hearing, which is scheduled for next week, will require a ‘high level Sony executive’ to testify before the members of the subcommittee.
According to a statement made by one of the US House of Representatives, the President of Sony Network Entertainment, Tim Schaff would be testifying on Sony’s behalf.
Ken Johnson, who is an aide to the chairwoman of the subcommittee, Mary Bono Mack stated, “We expect to introduce that legislation, which will provide new safeguards for American consumers, in the next few weeks."
What this means is that after the hearing, the world could very well see new laws implemented that could possibly crack down harder on cyber crime or set a standard of data protection and encryption for companies such as Sony to protect their customer’s
data.
For those who are not sure what this means and how the hearing would be different from a normal court hearing, the answer is very simple. In a court hearing, the law is simply implemented and enforced, whereas in a congressional hearing, much like the one
Mr. Hirai or any of the ‘high-level’ Sony executives will be facing, actually writes these laws.
The latter would seem more fitting as Sony, and in fact the gaming industry in general, does not have any specific security requirements when it comes to protecting their customer data.
Add to it Sony Corporation president and CEO, Howard Stringer’s alarming statement, “We have a network that gave people services free. It didn’t seem like the likeliest place for an attack.” A statement like that coming from a person such as Mr. Stringer
is a cause for concern.
The attacks took place in April which, upon discovery by Sony, led to the suspension of the PlayStation Network for three weeks. It was later reported that the personal and credit card information of 77 million users had been compromised.
A second attack followed that resulted in another 25 million users falling victim, taking the total number of people affected by the attack to over 100 million.
Sony hired two third party investigation teams to ascertain the damage as the company worked desperately in an effort to implement stricter security measures before getting the PSN back up.
The entire fiasco is reported to have cost Sony an estimated figure of over $171.2 million, but more importantly seemed to have lost the trust it had with its customers.
However, one has to take into consideration that this was the first such attack of its kind that took place on such a massive scale. Sony did have a host of security measures in place yet they ended up failing.
The hearing will do more good than any potential harm as it would ultimately result in guidelines that will force companies to better protect their customer’s data as well as set a fixed standard across the industry for others to do so as well.
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