EOC: Week 5: Sony Sleuths

With all the "Big Brother"-type of monitoring constantly happening in today's modern society, you'd think that a huge company like Sony would realize it was being hacked, and by whom, before over 100 million gamers' personal information was stolen. Obviously not.

Sony said it was "victim of a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack designed to steal personal and credit card information for illegal purposes." (http://tinyurl.com/3b8quok)

The big question is: How is this going to affect Sony and its millions of customers?

If I were one of the many whose information was hacked, you can bet that I would think twice before playing another game on my PlayStation. I'm not going to risk having my personal information, including my credit card, stolen again. This might cause a dramatic decline in Sony's sales and market value. A blow of this magnitude is just too great to be taken lightly. This might also in turn affect other video game companies, such as Microsoft. I mean, if the maker of one of the highest-grossing gaming consoles (the Playstation) can't protect its customers' privacy anymore, who can?

The bottom line is that Sony needs to somehow rectify this situation, if that's at all possible, to its customers. It needs to instill within its customers a sense of safety, that their privacy will never be invaded like this again. Maybe then Sony could recover from this [stealthy] debacle.