Feldon Today, the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing in Washington, DC on “The Threat of Data Theft to American Consumers.”
Kazuo Hirai, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Sony Computer Entertainment America, submitted written answers to questions posed by the subcommittee about the large-scale, criminal cyber-attack we have experienced. We wanted to share those answers with you.
- Complete 8 page written response (click here) on Flickr
- Summary on PlayStation Blog (click here)
Note that much of this information is generic to the PSN (SCEA) and SOE data breaches. Look for SOE and Sony Online Entertainment in the text of these letters if you wish to locate passages relevant to your game network.
A very well written and appropriate letter. I would recommend anyone who has questions about what happened to read it. It really does explain a lot.
Yes, their lawyers did a good job there. A bit polemic at certain points, but a good read.
I think its addresses the points very well, it washes away my conspiracy theories about it being an insider job (at least it had an outside element).
Looks too like Anonymous are now effectively a criminal organisation, their denial of service attacks that took down Visa etc might just have been bad timing. But I think in a civil court of law its irrelevant now so moneywise being found a member of that group probably means being potentially cleaned out by the courts.
If actual evidence does come to light though tracing the attacks back to a member then the criminal repercussions would be bad, 10 years would be light, my guess something like this would get 30+.
And if congress take this seriously (and don’t just have another show trial like Toyota) I expect there will be further monitoring legislated in to datacentres etc to aid in tracing hacks in future (if there isn’t enough already).
This is interesting
http://consumerist.com/2011/05/security-expert-sony-knew-its-software-was-obsolete-months-before-psn-breach.html
They missed something or other.. the committee chair was asking “Does anyone have any idea why they delayed?” so a bunch of random people could make guesses on their behalf. One suggested bringing the investigation into another committee when they were discussing who declined to attend.
Some Congressmen get testy when you say you have no time for them.