A resident of Birmingham, Alabama has filed a class action lawsuit against Sony in the U.S. District Court for Northern California over a critical PSN security breach that unceremoniously knocked the service offline.
According to court documents filed on behalf of Kristopher Johns, Sony allegedly “failed to encrypt data and establish adequate firewalls to handle a server intrusion contingency, failed to provide prompt and adequate warnings of security breaches, and unreasonably delayed in bringing the PSN service back on line.”
“We bought this lawsuit on behalf of consumers to learn the full extent of Sony PlayStation Network data security practices and the data loss and to seek a remedy for consumers,” explained Ira P. Rothken, an attorney who filed the class action complaint.
“We are hopeful that Sony will take this opportunity to learn from the network vulnerabilities, provide a remedy to consumers who entrusted their sensitive data to Sony, and lead the way in data security best practices going forward.”
Although Sony has yet to publicly comment on the lawsuit, company rep Patrick Seybold did attempt to justify the Japanese-based corporation’s decision to delay its warning about sensitive data that was compromised during the security breach.
“There’s a difference in timing between when we identified there was an intrusion and when we learned of consumers’ data being compromised. We learned there was an intrusion April 19th and subsequently shut the services down,” he claimed in a recent blog post.
“We then brought in outside experts to help us learn how the intrusion occurred and to conduct an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the incident. It was necessary to conduct several days of forensic analysis, and it took our experts until yesterday to understand the scope of the breach. We [subsequently] shared that information with our consumers and announced it publicly.”
Seybold also emphasized that Sony had a “clear path” to the resurrection of its PSN and Qriocity systems, with “some service” expected to be restored within a week.
“We’re working day and night to ensure it is done as quickly as possible,” he added.
