A Letter from Howard Stringer

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A Letter from Howard Stringer

Please see below for a letter from Howard Stringer:

Dear Friends,

I know this has been a frustrating time for all of you.

Let me assure you that the resources of this company have been focused on investigating the entire nature and impact of the cyber-attack we’ve all experienced and on fixing it. We are absolutely dedicated to restoring full and safe service as soon as possible and rewarding you for your patience. We will settle for nothing less.

To date, there is no confirmed evidence any credit card or personal information has been misused, and we continue to monitor the situation closely. We are also moving ahead with plans to help protect our customers from identity theft around the world. A program for U.S. PlayStation Network and Qriocity customers that includes a $1 million identity theft insurance policy per user was launched earlier today and announcements for other regions will be coming soon.

As we have announced, we will be offering a “Welcome Back” package to our customers once our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services are up and running. This will include, among other benefits, a month of free PlayStation Plus membership for all PSN customers, as well as an extension of subscriptions for PlayStation Plus and Music Unlimited customers to make up for time lost.

As a company we — and I — apologize for the inconvenience and concern caused by this attack. 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.

I know some believe we should have notified our customers earlier than we did. It’s a fair question. 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. 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 result of what we discovered we notified you of the breach. Our investigation is ongoing, and we are upgrading our security so that if attacks like this happen again, our defenses will be even stronger.

In the last few months, Sony has faced a terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan. But now we are facing a very man-made event – a criminal attack on us — and on you — and we are working with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies around the world to apprehend those responsible.

In the coming days, we will restore service to the networks and welcome you back to the fun. I wanted to personally reach out and let you know that we are committed to serving you to the very best of our ability, protecting your information better than ever, and getting you back to what you signed up for – all the games and great entertainment experiences that you expect from Sony.

With best regards,
Howard Stringer

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183 Comments

  • Digital-Big-Boss

    When PSN comes back up, please make sure it includes

    Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions
    Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
    Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2

    thanks

  • Thanks for the update, patiently waiting for the PSN and mainly the store to be back up!

  • Whoever is a hacker is a virgin.

  • any truth to the rumors of a new attack planned this weekend..???

    honestly, whats truly the point of these attacks…?? most hackers, at least those who were perturbed about removing Other OS features, as well as the charges against GeoHot, are not aiming at hurting the gamers… obviously, this is exactly what was done…. but if its just regular idiotic hackers, then why pinpoint Sony…? why didnt they hit Microsoft…?? or anyone else…?? its almost a guarantee its the same people who were upset before….

    i do hope they catch these people… or as many of them as they can… hacking like this should be considered terrorism and be punished by the full extent of those particular laws…

    This could’ve happened to any company… i wish people would be more mature about it and more patient….

  • i like waffles but if waffles had me wait all this time i would quite and psn is that waffle.(o_o)

  • + PennStateCivic on May 6th, 2011 at 2:46 pm said:
    ‘I’m getting sick of this waiting game! Give us a timeline! You are upsetting your customers…”

    Really? Don’t you realize that Sony is upset too? After all they very likely have lost millions, or billions, of dollars at this time. You want to play online games? Well Sony would like to oblige you. Unfortunately though, they cannot help you, or any of us, at this time. So as they work to put the Network online, they risk losing some “dedicated and loyal” customers…

    Sony cannot post a date as to when the PSN will be up again. What if they cannot meet that date due to internal or outside forces? We’ll have people complaining about Sony having announced a date and not meeting it to having announced the date at all. So, whether Sony announces a date or not wouldn’t really matter. People from both parties will feel compelled to complain. All “dedicated and loyal.”

    Take a few minutes to read the recent announcements and the replies. Maybe you’ll get a better idea about what Sony is going through. And hopefully you will see that the PSN will be back. But will you be on the PSN? I know I will be.

  • Platinum’d R&CF: Crack in Time and got into Portal 2 in the meantime.

    Looking to shoot some dudes in MAG this weekend.

  • Crack in Time isn’t as easy as I thought it’d be and am stuck somewhere in a puzzle. I need to complete it.

  • So how long do the final stages of internal testing take? I was kind of hoping (granted, this was too optimistic on my part) internal testing would only take up Thursday and half of today.

    Also when the bare minimum functionality is restored and we get that update that forces us to change our passwords, be sure to add a note somewhere in the blog post saying that the download may take longer than expected due to the extreme stress from all of these people trying to download it simultaneously. I know it’s common sense, but if I’ve been reading some of these comments correctly, then people just don’t have common sense anymore.

  • Sony has posted a loss of 23% in 2011. In the last 12 months, SNE is down 18%, as well. Looking at Sony’s last income statement, quarterly earnings growth of -9% and quarterly revenue growth of -1% aren’t encouraging for potential investors.

  • Well if news reports are to be believed then I cant see PSN being up any time soon. If anonymous are planning another attack on Sony then this is will delay the planned return. It saddens me that this is happening, there is no need for all this. This all started with geohot, everything was fine before that. That little worm as a lot to answer for.

  • Well if news reports are to be believed then I cant see PSN being up any time soon. If anonymous are planning another attack on Sony then this is will delay the planned return. It saddens me that this is happening, there is no need for all this.

  • They used an old unpatched version of apache on their servers. Also had no firewall. Was told 6 months prior to it on a forum moderated by Sony Staff.

    Sony gets no pitty from me…

  • 151

    Maybe, but that doesn’t give people the right to exploit it.

  • @+ ShadowDoGGG You beat me to the punchline .
    I think Sony is in really deep this time. They new of this ahead of time and did nothing.
    Glad to see some others are investigating this.

  • JaY_Ci_415 on May 6th, 2011 at 3:28 pm said:

    Whoever is a hacker is a virgin.
    Eh, what has the Lack of Promiscuity have to do with being a hacker or not?

  • Thank you kind sir :)

  • Fudge, was really hoping to see it online tonight but I guess that isn’t going to happen.

  • @151 all based on a bitter supposed expert who has no insight as to what Sony did, but he once read forum post!

  • Thanks. i really have to give thumbs up for standing up and accepting responsibility.

  • PSN will be back soon. I feels it.

  • silverserpant13

    Why are you only offering protection to the US customers, what about the rest of North america. I feel I was treated the same as an american but no retrobution for my personal information that was stolen from your network that I had to buy into.

    WHAT GIVES???

  • thank you

  • Did it really take the PS3 world to come crashing down before the all great Howard Stringer came on to the blog to apologize????? anyway

    Mr. Howard Stringer please look here https://share.blog.us.playstation.com/. This is what PS3 gamers been asking for but your current PS3 engineering force has not delivered on in the longest time. Please look into it.

  • psn + free for a month? then what? all the stuff that i “get for free because of the inconvenience” goes away. wow thanks for nothing for my inconvenience. how bout something i get to keep since your network gave them my info forever.

  • “To date, there is no confirmed evidence any credit card or personal information has been misused.”

    Of course Mr. Stringer would put that in his blog, for legal reasons of course.
    My credit card, the one credit card I used for a one-time dlc purchase on 10/28/2010, had a fraudulent charge made on 04/28/2011. Luckily I caught it and contested it before the cyber-criminals could really take me for a ride down debt street.

  • “To date, there is no confirmed evidence any credit card or personal information has been misused.”

    Of course Mr. Stringer would include that comment in his letter, for legal reasons I’m sure. I have received my credit reports from the three credit reporting agencies. I have initiated a fraud alert on my credit reports through these credit reporting agencies. I have disputed the fraudulant charge made to my compromised credit card and cancelled my compromised credit card.

  • what i thought would be better is if psn gave us like 20$ to get stuff off of playstation store

  • slimshady_lurkin

    wow really this is so annoying!! -_-

  • h

  • “To date, there is no confirmed evidence any credit card or personal information has been misused.”

    I know first hand that this statement is NOT TRUE. Thank you for being so honest and forthcoming with all of the information provided to your customers.

  • Finally!! Took long enough.

    Guess they should have took the MS approach and let peeps do what they want to do with their 360’s. Think of it as free R&D. Instead of patch, after patch, after patch… let peeps install OS’s and do other things with their Units, they bought it anyways. You’ll sell more units in the long run + increase popularity of the console.

    Kinda like how Honda is popular in the Rice Rocket tuner crowds.

    Besides, approx 7 bil ppl in the world, of which approx 77 mil has a PSN account(s), this doesn’t even include the ones without a PSN account. Your network is open to the world… think of it as a lottery, someone is going to win. It’s just a matter of WHEN.

  • well the psn is back up when is the playstation store going to be back up?

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