Speaking during an interview with Polygon, the President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America (SIEA), Shawn Layden, reflected on the 2011 PSN hack that cost the format holder millions of dollars.
Layden, who at the time of the cyber attacks was serving as Sony Network Entertainment International’s CEO, revealed that the company learned a great deal from the PSN outage, which compromised the accounts of more than 70 million users worldwide.
“It took years off my life. I remember the day. If it had to happen to us, I’m glad it happened then. We’ve learned so much from that experience. We were in as good a position as we could be at the time with what was, at the time, state of the art. But we did get hit and we have taken our capabilities in that area to the highest degree possible. So no one is complacent or, or ignorant about the dangers and the challenges that are out there but I think we are in a much better place today. We have had our baptism by fire.”
Hackers brought PSN offline in April 2011 during one of the biggest cyber scandals in recent history, with things getting so bad that Sony eventually offered a ‘Welcome Back’ compensation package once the dust had settled. Sony apologised for the whole affair during its E3 press conference that year, and hired a new security boss following the attacks in an effort to avoid future network issues.
Sadly this wasn’t the last time Sony would suffer PSN outage at the hands of cyber attacks. Notorious hackers Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the December 2014 PSN downtime, which left thousands of gamers unable to get online over the festive season.
Source: PSLS