In an open letter on the PlayStation Blog, Sony President and CEO Howard Stringer apologizes for the trouble caused by PSN downtime and explains what the company is doing to make up for it.
Sony Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Howard Stringer, the big cheese himself, has something he wants to say. He knows you’re frustrated with the PlayStation Network fiasco, and he wants you to know that Sony is throwing everything it has into investigating the attack and getting its services back online. Unfortunately, he doesn’t appear to have any idea about when that might actually happen.
But the news isn’t all bad. Stringer said there’s no evidence at this point that any stolen credit card information has been misused and also confirmed that U.S. PlayStation Network and Qriocity customers will be enrolled in the AllClear ID Plus identity theft protect program, that includes a $1 million insurance policy against identity theft, for one year at no charge.
A “Welcome Back” package will be offered to customers as well once the services are back online, which will include a month of free PlayStation Plus membership for all PSN customers and an extension of existing PlayStation Plus and Music Unlimited subscriptions to make up for lost time. Other as-yet-unrevealed benefits will also be offered.
Stringer acknowledged that it was “fair” to question whether the company waited too long to notify its customers of the breach, but said it acted as quickly as it could. “As soon as we discovered the potential scope of the intrusion, we shut down the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services and hired some of the best technical experts in the field to determine what happened,” he explained. “I wish we could have gotten the answers we needed sooner, but forensic analysis is a complex, time-consuming process. Hackers, after all, do their best to cover their tracks, and it took some time for our experts to find those tracks and begin to identify what personal information had – or had not – been taken.”
“As a company we – and I – apologize for the inconvenience and concern caused by this attack,” he wrote. “Under the leadership of Kazuo Hirai, we have teams working around the clock and around the world to restore your access to those services as quickly, and as safely, as possible.”
Stringer’s open letter to PSN customers can be read in full at the U.S. PlayStation Blog.
Thanks to Zelgon for the tip.
