Sony sued by PSN user

A US man has filed a lawsuit against Sony following the PSN hacker attack and user data leak that has seen the service shut down for over a week.

As noted by Cnet, Kristopher Johns, 36, from Birmingham, Alabama, filed the suit yesterday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. In it Sony are accused of not taking “reasonable care to protect, encrypt, and secure the private and sensitive data of its users”.

Other areas of the suit claim that Sony did not explain the severity of the security breach – which has user information of all 77m PSN users exposed to hackers – to its customers for an unacceptably long period of time. This meant that Johns and other users were not allowed “to make an informed decision as to whether to change credit card numbers, close the exposed accounts, check their credit reports, or take other mitigating actions”.

The lawsuit, which is seeking class action status, asks for financial compensation and free credit card monitoring for Johns.

The action could mark the beginning of a difficult legal period for Sony, which is already facing investigation by the ICO in the UK over user information protection.