Sony: we'll develop "hyper vigilance"

Like a super-hero, Sony will develop a sense of "hyper vigilance" to prevent hackers ever having their way with PSN again.

Sony Europe boss Andrew House told Eurogamer his company would do "everything in our power" to win back gamers' trust by ensuring PSN is a locked door.

"We've learnt some very painful but important lessons through the PSN experience," said House in an interview published on Eurogamer today. "I don't want to lose sight of the fact we were the target of a pretty much unprecedented sustained criminal attack that caused this situation."

"But that being said, we will do our absolute utmost to develop a sense of what I would call hyper vigilance.

"We are absolutely humbled and grateful for the faith consumers have continued to show in us, and we'll do everything in our power to be worthy of that faith and to provide our consumers with not just an entertaining and engaging experience but one that's also secure."

Sony apparently stored your personal PSN data in plain text files. They weren't encrypted. Was this adequate protection?

"Based on the knowledge we had at the time they were in our view appropriate," said House of the security measures.

"The scale of the attack we underwent was pretty unprecedented. But clearly we now live in a world where, not just for gaming companies, but any company that has a digital network business or part of their strategy has had to learn they need to invest huge resources and time and effort into protecting their consumers' data."

PlayStation Network went offline on 20th April. Nine days later Sony announced that personal data - including credit card details - had been stolen. Some 70 to 77 million PSN accounts were compromised. PS3 online gaming returned to the UK on 15th May. The PlayStation Store reopened on 2nd June.

There are still on-going investigations by the Informations Commissions Office into whether Sony breached the Data Protection Act by losing your personal details. The widely publicised PSN hack will cost Sony as a company an estimated £105 million by the end of March 2012.

In a hotly contested generation where Microsoft rules the online console roost, however, a relatively small bottom line won't matter as much as injured confidence in PSN as a platform.