Hirai: Hacking threatens "fabric of society"

The growing problem of online hacking represents more than simply a danger to PlayStation – it could actually threaten society itself.

That’s the claim of Sony’s deputy president Kaz Hirai, who has also pointed out that Sony are far from the only victims of such incidents in recent weeks.

"Just generally speaking, whether it’s PSN or any other non-Sony services, in the past week several companies and organisations also got hacked as well," he told The Guardian.

"I think there are reports that the FBI got hacked. So this isn’t something that is a Microsoft issue or a Sony issue or limited to one or two companies. This is actually a lot bigger than that. It’s large enough to the extent that we’re talking about any and all companies, organisations and entities that deal in the online space – which is pretty much everyone at this stage, isn’t it?

"It’s a threat, not just to Sony or a couple of other companies, but to the very fabric of society. Therefore it requires individuals and companies to be very vigilant, which goes without saying, and we need help from various government, various enforcement agencies and legislation in certain instances as well. And this needs to be a worldwide effort."

However, despite the fact that some PSN services were offline for over 40 days, Hirai says that some of Sony’s security measures are now only "in line" with standard industry practice.

"We had moved the data centres and we basically have done everything to bring our practices at least in line with industry standards or better," he continued.

"I’m not going to get into details of what we did and have not done for security reasons. But I can tell you that, as far as the PS3 is concerned, we’ve done everything that we thought we could to make sure we’re protecting our consumers’ data as aggressively as possible."