Sony Sees Self as One of Group of Hack Victims
Company Clueless on Who Instigated Breach
Sony remains in the dark on who hacked its Playstation website in April.
"We still have no insights into who attacked us," Jack Tretton, president and chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment America, said in an interview with nytimes.com's Nick Bilton.
In April, in one of the largest commercial breaches ever, Sony revealed that hackers accessed personal information it stores on 77 million users of its PlayStation Network and Qriocity online service (see Sony Breach Ignites Phishing Fears).
Though Tretton didn't minimize the breach - "this was a real wakeup call we had to go through" - he grouped Sony with a growing number of other organizations that have experienced hacks in recent weeks. "If you read the newspapers, you realize that there are companies being bombarded with people trying to hack them all the time."
Tretton said Sony has been ever vigilant and believes its system is more secure than ever. That still hasn't prevented Sony websites from being breached by Lulz Security, the gray-hacker group that targeted the Senate over the weekend (see Group Claims Hack on Senate Computers). LulzSec, though not involved with the damaging breach in April, claims to have hacked several Sony websites on June 2.
In the interview, Tretton reiterated that Sony created a new post of chief information security officer on May 2 (see Breach Gets Sony to Create CISO Post). Sony hadn't formally announced whether the job had been filled, but in an e-mail exchange with Bilton, the blogger said Sony on several occasions told him the post is occupied, though he doesn't know by whom.
What else is Sony doing to protect people's data? "I'm not a security expert so I have other people working on this," Tretton said. "We are doing everything we can to protect our customers."
Confident words, but do they reassure customers or is Sony still in the dark about its IT security? Perhaps, they do. Tretton said 90 percent of Sony's customers - 70 million people - have returned to gaming on its site.
