Sony’s president Kaz Hirai s geen onbekende bij ons. De man die alles zo’n beetje regelt bij Sony PlayStation en natuurlijk alles weet, of het nou over de PS Vita is of over de onlangs gehackte servers van het PlayStation Network.

Sony is getroffen door deze digitale aanval en hij is daar heel duidelijk over. Hij ziet deze hacktiviteiten niet alleen als een aanval op Sony zelf, maar ook op de samenleving in het algemeen. Daar heeft hij wel een punt, want niet alleen Sony was hierdoor de dupe, maar ook ruim 77 miljoen gamers die aangesloten zitten op het PSN.

“Just generally speaking, whether it’s PSN or any other non-Sony services, in the past week several companies and organisations also got hacked as well,” he said. “I think there are reports that the FBI got hacked. So this isn’t something that is a Microsoft issue or a Sony issue or limited to one or two companies. This is actually a lot bigger than that. It’s large enough to the extent that we’re talking about any and all companies, organisations and entities that deal in the online space – which is pretty much everyone at this stage, isn’t it?

It’s a threat, not just to Sony or a couple of other companies, but to the very fabric of society. Therefore it requires individuals and companies to be very vigilant, which goes without saying, and we need help from various government, various enforcement agencies and legislation in certain instances as well. And this needs to be a worldwide effort.”

Verder verdedigt Hirai ook de tactiek die Sony heeft ondernomen toen ze erachter kwamen dat de PSN-servers werden aangevallen. Hij zegt juist dat Sony ‘agressief’ heeft gereageerd en niet een week heeft gewacht om met de precies juiste informatie naar buiten te komen.

“As you probably know, there are laws in a number of states in the US that have legal requirements which, in a nutshell, mean you can’t just go out there and drop a statement like that without being able to answer some fundamental questions,” he said. “You need to do your due diligence before you make a statement. We obviously wanted to make sure that we met those requirements.We also wanted, just as good practice, to try and garner as much information as possible before making any announcements.

So I don’t think we ‘waited’ a week. I think it took a week to make sure that we had, at least what we thought was enough information that was credible at the time before we made any announcements.

As you probably know, when we made the announcement that we restored the services, we had moved the data centres and we basically have done everything to bring our practices at least in line with industry standards or better. I’m not going to get into details of what we did and have not done for security reasons. But I can tell you that, as far as the PS3 is concerned, we’ve done everything that we thought we could to make sure we’re protecting our consumers’ data as aggressively as possible.”