A newly filed lawsuit against Sony claims that recent layoffs at its Sony Online Entertainment included some employees at the division"s Network Operations Center, just a couple of weeks before both Sony Online and the Playstation Network got hit with a cyber attack. Reuters reports that the class action lawsuit, filed on Monday in Sony Online"s headquarters town of San Diego, claimed that Sony also "knew it was at increased risk of attack because it had experienced prior, smaller breaches."
The lawsuit also claims that Sony spent a lot of money to upgrade the security for protection of corporate data but failed to put the same kind of security for the data taken by Sony Online"s customers. So far Sony has yet to respond to the lawsuit.
On April 20, a cyber attack caused Sony to shut down the console-based Playstation Network online service. A couple of weeks later Sony discovered that the attacks had also affected the MMO servers of Sony Online and shut that service down as well. Both attacks exposed tens of millions of customers" personal info to the cyber attackers.
Sony only began to restore the online networks in late May. Sony has said it has boosted its online security measures but the company has still suffered from numerous cyber attacks at various Sony owned and operated web sites. Sony has blamed the hacker group Anonymous for the cyber attacks on Sony Online and the Playstation Network but its a claim that the group has officially denied.