While it’s important to remember Sony (and all PlayStation Network users) are the victims of a crime when we talk about the PSN attacks, it’s also important to know why Sony has come in for criticism over the affair.
It’s been accused of acting too slowly in alerting customers, but perhaps just as damning is the revelation that, despite the PlayStation Network having been hacked at least once before, Sony boss Sir Howard Stringer claims in an interview with Bloomberg to have known nothing about the previous intrusion.
Could this lack of information at the top have led to a sense of complacency over Sony’s level of security?
“We have a network that gave people services free,” Stringer tells Bloomberg in relation to Sony’s level of PSN security. “It didn’t seem like the likeliest place for an attack.”
Making matters worse is the fact it appears the company had suffered additional hacks in 2008, including a September 2008 intrusion into Sony’s developer network by a British teenager and a December 2008 hack in PlayStation Home.
Saying that these 2008 attacks were unrelated to those in 2011, a Sony spokesperson told Bloomberg “The one incident that related to PlayStation Network, once we identified what it was, they went in and fixed it.”
The same report then discusses the rumour that a staging point for last month’s attack was a Navy computer in California being used as a proxy server (with the hackers first supposedly making use of a server rented from Amazon).
Sony Chief Stringer Blindsided by Hackers [Bloomberg]
(Top photo by Koichi Kamoshida | Getty)
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