Playstation Network hack results in lawsuit

A little over a week ago, Sony took the Playstation Network (PSN), the online environment where Playstation owners can meet to play with and against each other, offline. Hackers had dug a deep hole in the system, opening up the way to the personal data of the 77 million PSN members. To prevent further damage and repair the leak, Sony took drastic measures and pulled the plug on the network.

Gamers are, understandably, grumbling about the results of the hack. Not only have multiplayer modes been unavailable, some hold Sony responsible for their personal data possibly being compromised. One gamer, Kristopher Johns, has raised his grumble to a roar and has filed a suit against Sony for negligence.

According to Johns, Sony should have informed PSN members much earlier about the possibility that their personal data and even their credit card data were accessed by hackers. "[Sony] unduly delayed or failed to inform in a timely fashion the appropriate entities and consumers whose data was compromised of their vulnerabilities and exposure to credit card (or other) fraud." By delaying, the suit reads, Sony might have made the problem worse. Johns is seeking class action status, financial compensation and free credit report monitoring for all people involved.

Sony’s response is that at first, it failed to appreciate the scale of the hack. Said director of communications Patrick Seybold: "There's a difference in timing between when we identified there was an intrusion and when we learned of consumers' data being compromised. It was necessary to conduct several days of forensic analysis, and it took our experts until [Monday] to understand the scope of the breach."

Source: PC World