Sony bosses appear to have learned their lessons from the 2011 PlayStation Network data breach by swiftly reassuring customers that an online attack at the weekend has not affected any personal information.
The latest Sony outage was part of a wider “distributed denial of service” attack that also affected XBox Live users as well as Battle.net, the firm behind World of Warcraft.
Several groups have claimed responsibility for the attack, including one linked to Anonymous hacking collective and another claiming to be linked to the jihadist group Islamic State.
In the wake of the 2011 hack attack, in which the personal information of about 77 million PSN users worldwide was compromised, Sony chiefs came under a barrage of criticism for the handling of the issue.
It took Sony over a week to admit there had been a breach and even then it initially refused to take any blame. The company, which was blasted by the EU, the FBI and other US government officials as well as by its millions of customers, was eventually fined £250,000 by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office for breaching UK data protection laws.
However, this time the firm appears to be firmly on the case. “We have seen no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorized access to users’ personal information,” social media manager Sid Shuman blogged. “We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused by this issue.”
Microsoft declined to comment on the root cause of disruption of the Xbox Live online gaming service, although a message on its support site stated that Xbox One owners were experiencing “server unavailability issues” when trying to join other players in online games.
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Sony learns from 2011 data breach by acting swiftly over weekend attack http://t.co/Y1xUamHvTZ #digitalmarketing #data #dataprotection
RT @DM_editor: Sony learns from 2011 data breach by acting swiftly over weekend attack http://t.co/Y1xUamHvTZ #digitalmarketing #data #data…