As far as tarnished reputations go, Sony is currently in rare air. The initial hacking furore of mid-April, which resulting in the company’s PSN gaming network and Qriocity media service being shut down for three weeks, is far from over. Although the basic services are back online and, Sony President Sir Howard Stringer says, “more secure than ever”, the company is still being hacked on an almost daily basis.
The targets for these hacks are less high-profile than the PSN, which gave up 77 million users’ details when it was cracked open, or Sony Online Entertainment, which doled out another 25 million personal records and a tranche of credit card details, but are nonetheless significant. The ongoing hacks seem to have acted like a red rag to a bull, and more hackers are turning on Sony, seeing them as any easy target.
In the last few days the Greek and Japanese websites of music labels Sony BMG, as well as a Sony Ericsson site have all been hacked. These hacks appear to be more for sport than the collection of sensitive data – the sites have been defaced and replaced with victorious messages from the hackers. One of the groups responsible, LulzSec, posted a message saying “we just want to embarrass Sony some more. Can this be hack number 8? 7 and a half?!”
The continued exploits certainly seem to indicate Sony was not a company that saw security as a top priority up until now, however with the Japanese firm reportedly estimating the bill for the PSN outage at over $170 million – combined with rising expenses and lower production as a result of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami – we’re betting they’re going to take their security just a little more seriously from now on.
