I know that we’ve already talked about the PSN outage, but over the last week there’s been a lot of revelations about the breach that Sony suffered. First, and most important to PSN users is the breach of information. According to Cnet News:
The information exposed includes customer names; addresses; e-mail addresses; birthdays; PlayStation Network and Qriocity passwords and usernames; as well as online user handles. Sony says there is “no evidence” that credit card information was compromised, but the company advised customers to monitor their credit cards for erroneous charges anyway.
The biggest question is why it took Sony so long to tell everyone (they found out on April 14th but didn’t release that customer information had been compromised until April 26th), and since there are many customers that are suing, Sony’s got a major problem on their hands.
Their financial problems don’t just end at lawsuits either, it looks like it could cost Sony around $24 billion dollars to recover from the breach. I bet Sony executive are extremely happy that they’re not in the midst of the release of a new console (an endeavor that usually begins with massive losses), but it makes a person wonder exactly how they plan to recover from this. Users are going to have to be convinced that once the PSN is back online (if it ever is) that it’s safe to do business over it. That alone could take years and there’s no telling how many of their users will switch over the Xbox 360 for the more stable and reliable Xbox Live service (even though it does cost $60 a year).
I guess only time will tell what will happen to Sony, but it doesn’t look good in the short term.