Sony Issues Response To House Of Representatives Over PSN Outage
Sony has just released what is their response to some 13 questions that was asked to them by the U.S. House of Representatives, addressing the massive data breach that the company had recently suffered. Millions upon millions of PlayStation Network users’ information was compromised int he breach when the network was hacked back in April.
Sony’s CEO Kazuo Hirai submitted the company’s response in a six-page letter to the House of Representatives, addressing each and every question that was asked. He also shared those answers with the public. A brief rundown of his letter is as follows:
- Sony has been the victim of a very carefully planned, professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack.
- They discovered that the intruders had planted a file on one of our Sony Online Entertainment servers named “Anonymous” with the words “We are Legion.”
- By April 25, forensic teams were able to confirm the scope of the personal data they believed had been taken, and could not rule out whether credit card information had been accessed. On April 26, they notified customers of those facts.
- As of today, the major credit card companies have not reported any fraudulent transactions that they believe are the direct result of this cyber attack.
- Protecting individuals’ personal data is the highest priority and ensuring that the Internet can be made secure for commerce is also essential. Worldwide, countries and businesses will have to come together to ensure the safety of commerce over the Internet and find ways to combat cyber crime and cyber terrorism.
- Sony is taking a number of steps to prevent future breaches, including enhanced levels of data protection and encryption; enhanced ability to detect software intrusions, unauthorized access and unusual activity patterns; additional firewalls; establishment of a new data center in an undisclosed location with increased security; and the naming of a new Chief Information Security Officer.
In the letter Hirai responded to a bit of criticism that the company has been hit with over the past two weeks. He stated:
“I am of course aware of the criticism Sony has received for the time taken to disclose information to our customers. I hope you can appreciate the extraordinary nature of the events the company was facing – brought on by a criminal hacker whose activity was neither immediately nor easily ascertainable. I believe that after you review all the facts you will agree that the company has been acting in good faith to release reliable information in accordance with its legal and ethical responsibilities to its valued customers.”
That being said, there is one thing that had come out in the letter that was a bit stunning. Hirai mentioned that during the investigation into the network, the company found a file in the system by the name of “Anonymous” that also contained the words “We Are Legion.” This find directly contradicts the statement released by Anonymous on April 22nd, stating that they had no hand in the network intrusion. They even went as far as to say, “For Once We Didn’t Do It.” Not directly pointing the finger at the hacker collective, Hirai stated that “it could be the case that the other Anons have acted by themselves,” and “AnonOps is taking advantage of Anonymous’ previous ill-will towards the company to distract users from the fact that the outage is actually an internal problem with the companies servers.”
Hirai goes on to further explain the actions of the company when the initial attack was found in page four of the letter. He explains that by the evening of April 21st, the forensic team was able to confirm that unauthorized access was obtained into their system, and the users went through very discrete planning to hide their presence from site administrators. Even more so, it took the company longer than they expected to gain the aid of the FBI.
Right now we know that the PSN is still down, and we don’t exactly know when it will be back up and running. Sony will be rolling out their “Welcome Back Initiative” to all PSN users, and specific network details are coming shortly. For more of Harai’s letter, head to Sony’s post here.
