Following the mid-April hacking of Sony's PlayStation Network which forced the company to take the drastic and necessary step of shutting it down completely for one month in North America and Europe, a few executives stepped up to allay customer fears, apologize and attempt to make amends via a freebie-filled "Welcome Back" program. Andrew House, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe's chief, has now come forward to offer his own thoughts.
The executive spoke with UK video game news site CVG this week and offered some thoughts on the "external intrusion" which affected over 70 million PlayStation users worldwide.
"The first thing I'd like to say to people is that we're generally humbled and extremely grateful to those consumers who have continued to put their trust in us," House told CVG. "We'll do our absolute best to try and make our system as secure as we possibly can."
Sony has not stated exactly how the PSN was hacked. Kaz Hirai, Sony's Executive Deputy President, framed the attack as "highly sophisticated" and divulged that the perpetrators "took steps to cover their tracks." It took the company nearly one month to relaunch basic PSN services (such as online gameplay), and even longer to reopen the online store where gamers can buy additional content.
House, who was promoted to his current position in 2009, believes the company's gestures so far (free games, promotional subscription offers, identity theft protection, etc.) are "early steps on a long road," saying Sony still needs to "restore consumer faith in the brand."
When asked what Sony learned from the PSN debacle, House opined that Sony and other companies need to "adopt a stance of hyper vigilance" in the digital age when it comes to protecting consumer data.
"That has to be a constant, ongoing effort," he said. "I think it's now part of doing business."
House's comments about "other companies" rings especially true. Since the PSN attack, numerous game developers and publishers have been on the receiving end of varying cyber shenanigans.
In May, European developer Eidos saw the official site of its upcoming game "Deus Ex: Human Revolution" marked with graffiti and the email addresses of registered customers illegally accessed. UK-based Codemasters was also targeted, as were Sega, Bethesda, Nintendo and a handful of online game servers.
Though none of the above attacks proved as disastrous as the PSN incident, they have broached an important question: what, if anything, are companies actually doing to secure customer data? (via CVG)
