Sony discusses the ‘irony’ of PSN hack

The president and CEO of SCE Andrew House has labelled last year’s high-profile hack on the PlayStation Network as ironic”.

The statement comes as much of the internet – including most famously Wikipedia – have ceased operations for a day in protest at the proposed US legislation SOPA that is designed to combat piracy and illegal content sharing online.

The irony, for me, is that we became the target because we thought, I think quite fairly, that we were trying to protect our intellectual property rights from piracy,” House told CVG.

But it was ironically that which led a certain sector of opinion to think that, somehow, we were acting against their best interests. That will be an ongoing challenge, and I think it’s one we’ll have to take extremely seriously.”

House went on to insist that Sony is now a far safer digital entity than it ever was before.

Not to sound like an excuse, but we’re now in very solid company with many other institutions and companies that are suffering under the same sort of threat,” he insisted. But it galvanised us, right up to the very top of the company.

We’ve hired an extremely experienced chief information security officer at the corporate level, not just on the PlayStation level. We’ve revamped our systems to the best of our ability, to try to ensure that this kind of thing, as far as possible, can be prevented. But there were some very ugly threats going on, and we became the target.”