The PSN hack is one of the largest scandals in cyber history, and one of the lowest points in Sony’s tenure as a platform holder. For almost a month, the PSN network was taken down by hackers, and over 70 million users had their information compromised. In and of itself, that was terrible- but Sony’s poor communication at the time exacerbated matters further.
Shawn Layden, who is the current head of PlayStation in America, was at the time Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of PlayStation Network Entertainment. Speaking to Polygon about the hack, Layden was frank, stating that it was a ‘baptism by fire’, and that Sony ended up learning a lot from the incident.
“If it had to happen to us, I’m glad it happened then. We’ve learned so much from that experience,” he said. “We were in as good a position as we could be at the time with what was, at the time, state of the art. But we did get hit and we have taken our capabilities in that area to the highest degree possible. So no one is complacent or, or ignorant about the dangers and the challenges that are out there but I think we are in a much better place today. We have had our baptism by fire.”
While the PSN has a whole lot of issues still, these are relatively minor compared to the sheer scope of how bad the network outage and security flaws were at the time- and I am glad Sony learned from the experience to make PSN better, relative to what it used to be, at least.