Sony’s president, chairman, and CEO, Howard Stringer, has issued letter of apology to PlayStation Network, Qriocity, and other Sony users who have been affected by the firm’s massive security breach. “Let me assure you that the resources of this company have been focused on investigating the entire nature and impact of the cyber-attack we’ve all experienced and on fixing it,” Stringer said. “We are absolutely dedicated to restoring full and safe service as soon as possible and rewarding you for your patience. We will settle for nothing less.” A total of 101 million accounts across Sony’s network were compromised and 12.3 million credit card numbers were stolen by hackers. However, Stringer said that there’s currently no evidence that those numbers have been misused and that Sony has issued a $1 million identity theft insurance policy for U.S. PSN and Qriocity customers, with other regions to follow. Hit the jump for more from Stringer’s letter, including information on Sony’s “Welcome Back” package.
Stringer confirmed Sony will provide customers with a “Welcome Back” package that includes one month of its PlayStation Plus service for free — it will also credit accounts for the network’s downtime. As for why it took Sony so long to alert its customers of the issue, Stringer had this to say:
As soon as we discovered the potential scope of the intrusion, we shut down the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services and hired some of the best technical experts in the field to determine what happened. I wish we could have gotten the answers we needed sooner, but forensic analysis is a complex, time-consuming process. Hackers, after all, 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.
Stringer says Sony hopes to have the ship righted and services restored in the next couple of days. Hit the read link for the full letter.
