Sony is weighing whether to offer a reward for information on the hackers behind the massive PlayStation Network outage, now in its 18th day, CNET reports. Its potential amount was not mentioned.
Quoting unidentified sources, CNET said Sony is discussing the pros and cons of such a decision but has yet to get any go-ahead from the company’s senior executives in Tokyo. Any reward offered would be done in cooperation with law enforcement in multiple countries, including the FBI, currently investigating the attack on PSN’s data centre in San Diego.
Separately, Sony denied allegations, made in Congressional testimony on Thursday, that its servers were not running under the most current security update and that they had lacked basic measures of protection such as firewalls.
“The previous network for Sony Network Entertainment International and Sony Online Entertaiment used servers that were patched and updated recently, and had multiple security measures in place, including firewalls,” said Patrick Seybold, the top spokesman for PlayStation, according to CNET.
CNET also has a copy of Sony’s May 5 reply to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who on April 26 had demanded answers from the company as to the scope of the data breach, and assurances that consumers’ personal information is adequately protected.
The reply, by Kazuo Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, goes into greater detail on the April 19 attack that brought down PlayStation Network, saying hackers “had used very sophisticated and aggressive techniques to obtain unauthorized access to the servers and hide their presence from the system administrators.”
The full reply, which contains details previously discussed in Sony’s response to a U.S. House of Representatives committee on May 4, can be read here.
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