It may have taken over a fortnight to write, but Sony has finally apologised to its 100 million customers for the hack attack which has seen their personal data compromised.
Yet in the letter to customers Sony US chief Howard Stringer stops short of laying the blame at the company’s door, citing the slow process of forensic analysis for the delay. Yesterday it tried to blame the hacking group Anonymous for the outage.
The letter said: “I wish we could have got the answers we needed sooner, but forensic analysis is a complex, time-consuming process. Hackers do their best to cover their tracks, and it took some time for our experts to find those tracks and begin to identify what personal information had or had not been taken.”
Stinger emphasised that, to date, there is no evidence that any credit card or personal information has been misused. He also says Sony is moving ahead with plans to help protect customers from identity theft around the world and will be offering a “Welcome Back” package once its networks are restored.
The company has already launched a programme for US PlayStation Network customers that includes a $1m identity theft insurance policy per user. Announcements for other regions will be coming soon, the company said.
The Welcome Back package will include a month of free PlayStation Plus membership for all PSN customers, as well as an extension of subscriptions for PlayStation Plus and Music Unlimited customers to make up for time lost, says Stringer.
Sony is desperate to win back the confidence and goodwill of its customers after one of the biggest-ever breaches of personal information, although it has yet to make any firm commitment on when the services will be up and running again, simply stating it will be restored “in the coming days”.
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