Sony PlayStation Security Breach and IT Security

Running Head: IT security
SONY PLAYSTATION SECURITY BREACH

IT security
In today’s era of rapid technological
advancement businesses organizations are
heavily relying on the internet to operate
their business successfully. Though using
internet platform for the business provides
them a good competitive edge but it also
exposes them to the risks of cyber-attacks. A
security breach is an incident that occurs
when an unauthorized person or application
enters into a private confidential IT
perimeter by an illegitimate way.
Occurrence of security breaches have
become quite common in today’s digital
world.
One of the major data breach occurred at
Sony in April, 2011 when the company
realized hackers had attacked the data center
located at San Diego by gaining
unauthorized access to Sony’s PlayStation
Network servers with the aim of stealing
customer data. The personal information
such as names, addresses, account login
credentials, birth-dates and online IDs of
around 77 million users had been stolen
from their PlayStations and Qriocity
customer accounts and also from the 24.5
million user accounts of Sony Online
Entertainment. The hackers illegitimately
accessed Sony’s servers at the time when its
servers had hit by denial-of-service attacks
[4].
As a result of attack by the anonymous
hackers, Sony had to shut down its system
for few days. For such period company had
to offer its customers free services for the
shut-down period along with a free
additional month of service as
compensation. Besides this, Sony also had to
bear the cost of providing customer support,
network up-gradation, legal fees and various
other activities. All these expenses had cost
the company over $ 171 million [3].
The breach had affected the company
adversely but it could have been prevented if
IT security was made the integral part of
Sony’s company culture. If the company had