A UK government body has fined Sony £250,000 (about $394,570) for the devastating 2011 hack of its PlayStation Network, which resulted in one of the largest online breaches ever.
The Information Commissioner's Office announced the fine on Thursday, a little less than two years after Sony officials first disclosed the criminal intrusion into the online game platform. The breach exposed names, addresses, e-mail addresses, dates of birth, and cryptographically hashed passwords associated with some 77 million accounts. It also put credit card data at risk. The hack resulted in Sony shutting down the network for more than three weeks as engineers contained the damage and rebuilt the network.
"There’s no disguising that this is a business that should have known better," David Smith, deputy commissioner and director of data protection, said in the statement. "It is a company that trades on its technical expertise, and there's no doubt in my mind that they had access to both the technical knowledge and the resources to keep this information safe."
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