Sony chief executive Howard Stringer is risking the wrath of his 100 million customers – as well as the authorities – by mounting a bullish defence of the company’s reaction to one of the world’s biggest data breaches.
Hitting back at critics, many of whom are his own customers, Stringer told reporters: “This was an unprecedented situation. Most of these breaches go unreported by companies. Forty-three per cent notify victims within a month. We reported in a week. You’re telling me my week wasn’t fast enough?”
Sony came under fire for a number of reasons, including on the delay between discovering the problem and notifying customers, Stringer’s lack of public comment, the dearth of updates as to when service would be restored, the confusion over exactly what had been stolen from PSN’s or Sony Online Entertainment’s servers, and finally, some customers have even been complaining about the free PSN content offered by Sony to make amends for the issues.
Stringer also explained that the company was still assessing the financial damage of the hack estimated by one expert to be as high as $2bn. “There’s a charge for the system being down … a charge for identity theft insurance,” he said. “The charges mount up, but they don’t add up to a number we can quantify just yet.”
Meanwhile the compensation package that Sony has offered returning customers has also attracked criticism. Users who have been locked out of their services for almost a month are offered two out of a choice of five games, although it seems most of the games people have already owned, completed and sold on.
One user compared the welcome back to the sort of welcome you might get at Fawlty Towers, others were even less complimentary.
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