Sony"s CEO Howard Stringer has gone on the offensive today defending his company"s response to the cyber attacks that shut down both the Playstation Network and the MMO servers of Sony Online Entertainment. Reuters reports that Stringer, speaking publicly for the first time to reporters about the cyber attacks, said, ""Most of these breaches go unreported by companies. Forty-three percent (of companies) notify victims within a month. We reported in a week. You"re telling me my week wasn"t fast enough."
Stringer also said that it was too early to tell how much money it will cost Sony to deal with the cyber attacks that shut down the Playstation Network for 23 days and Sony Online"s servers for close to two weeks. He said, "There"s a charge for the system being down ... a charge for identity theft insurance. The charges mount up, but they don"t add up to a number we can quantify just yet." Sony reps also said today that despite news reports made a few days ago there was no evidence that the cyber attacks originated from a rented cloud server from Amazon.com. Stringer also defended and supported Kazuo Hirai, the current head of Sony"s Playstation business, saying, "I think his leadership has been very helpful and very demonstrative and I"m endorsing him."
Sony is still in the process of restoring all features on the Playstation Network, including the Playstation Store. Once that service is back up, Playstation Network users in both the US and Europe will be able to download two free games from the service, among other compensation measures. However the Playstation Network is still down in a number of Asian countries including Sony"s home country of Japan. Playstation executive Shuhei Yoshida has admitted in a story at Venture Beat that, "These past three weeks have been the longest three weeks of my life on PlayStation." Full service should be restored by the end of May, according to Sony.