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Sony fined for 2011 PSN outage but plans to appeal

Posted January 24th, 2013 at 04:36 EDT by Steven Williamson
11 Comments

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has been fined for a “serious breach” of the Data Protection Act following the wide-spread, much-publicised hacking of the PlayStation Network in 2011, reports the BBC.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has confirmed that Sony will be fined £250,000 for failing to secure its customer’s private data privately.

"If you are responsible for so many payment card details and log-in details then keeping that personal data secure has to be your priority," said David Smith, deputy commissioner and director of data protection at the ICO, who also said that “security measures in place were simply not good enough."

The hacking, which took place in April 2011, lead to the leak of personal data from 77 million PSN accounts and took the network offline for almost a month. Sony apologised and users were given compensation in the form of the “Welcome Back” program which offered them free games and PlayStation Plus trials.

The attack is believed to have cost Sony approximately $171 million in total, so a £250,000 fine shouldn’t really have too much affect. Nonetheless, Sony has told the BBC that it will appeal against the decision.

Comments

Anth67
- 4:45am EST - January 24th, 2013
- 1
Unless they plan on donating that fine to the users, then what's the point? Who will really benefit from it? From something that wasn't even SONY's fault?
Syphon_Filter | Syphon_Filter2
- 5:32am EST - January 24th, 2013
- 2
If Sony has to pay. We most get the money not bastards sitting behind chairs. We have had our accounts not them so overall its useless and Sony shouldn't pay a cent for these donkeys.
TheTenth666
- 6:36am EST - January 24th, 2013
- 3
what judge did that? there was no prejudice so there should be no fine, simple as that
LfCpS3
- 8:37am EST - January 24th, 2013
- 4
We get the money? for what?

Did you lsoe money? Did they get your details and take out money?

The online is free anyway so unless it was like XBL were you pay, we should not get the money either unless you lost money because of this outage, which i am sure no one did.
Benedict Pearman
- 5:43pm EST - January 24th, 2013
- 5
I don't see why they should be fined. They reacted instantly when PSN got hacked and shut the system down. In reality doing that kept us safer and the hackers couldn't access it. So really they did the best they could at the time which was shut it down and keep our accounts safe.

Surely if you're going to fine someone for this, why not fine them closer to the time it actually happened instead of waiting almost a year and a half. Ive not really thought anymore of it.

The ICO seem to be making more fuss about this than us Users. I was happy with the free stuff that was given. Plus it took balls for them to apologize during last years E3.
jamesobachand | snake2112
- 6:02pm EST - January 24th, 2013
- 6
The fine is rediculous. And Anth67 the first thing I though was, "who gets the money from the fine." Obviously not us the consumer but some lazy fat you-know-what. Really bothers me, cause over the last year I have recieved 3-4 checks all totaling under $35 for stupid law suits where "the people" of certain situations were supposedly damaged. Funny thing is that these attorneys are really the only ones being compensated. With the "Bank of America" lawsuit I had actually lost almost $800 off their unappropriate reactions; and worse I was compensated a mere $20 and I know the sue happy fat cats made way more than that.

I'm not sure that the compensation that Sony put out was the correct response but it sure was better than all the other companies that made similar mistakes. Maybe they should have put a certain amount of money on the PS3 users accounts that were effected - to spend whenever and however the user wanted. I was a little upset and I was offline for way over a month but again the fine is rediculous.

I just wish Sony would fix my account issues that won't allow my main account to work correctly with DC Universe Online and my Home accounts.
Gameoholic007 | Demented007
- 7:29pm EST - January 24th, 2013
- 7
This won't get anywhere, just like what took place in NA. You don't pay for access to the network because its free, Sony owes you nothing. The people should be happy that Sony gave away free games as an apology, because Sony didn't even have to do that.
princevegeta1980
- 5:55am EST - January 25th, 2013
- 8
This is scandale, sony shouldn't be fined for this plus they already made up for us when they gave out free games to PSN subscribers!
Bones311
- 2:28pm EST - January 26th, 2013
- 9
@4 clearly has no sense of hypotheticals. step down off your high horse for a moment and start reading peoples comments for what they actually mean.
Petra_Kalbrain1
- 7:44am EST - January 27th, 2013
- 10
So, basically, the ICO was sitting around wondering how they would get their budget for the next 6 months and someone mentioned that Sony could be fined for that incident way back when???

Stupidity reigns supreme in the boardrooms of the upper crust!

Honestly, I don't even know what is worse. The fact that these people are trying to get away with this, or the fact that it seems like they can just up and decide to get away with it without anybody to tell them otherwise.
Beasley2K
- 5:07pm EST - February 5th, 2013
- 11
@4 No-one should be getting any money, but I think the view of previous commenters is that if Sony is fined, the money should go to those that were affected, ie. us, and not the ICO, who have no reason to obtain the money.