Microsoft Feels Bad About PSN Hacking, Says It's Protecting Xbox Live Users

Microsoft has issued a fresh statement on the hacker attack that was suffered by Sony's PlayStation Network, and pledged that it's doing "everything it can to be sure users' data is secure."

Sony was attacked by hackers back in April, which prompted it to take down its PlayStation Network online service in order to rebuild it in a more secure fashion.

Microsoft issued a statement just after the attack, where it said that the whole situation was bad for the industry.

Now, the company's Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Dennis Durkin, talked with Industry Gamers about the whole hacking scandal and how it affected the games industry as a whole.

"It’s bad for the industry that this has happened to Sony. It’s very, very bad. It’s very damaging. So we don’t wish that upon anybody and you've seen we’ve been actually pretty quiet on the subject because we don’t want to appear to even be looking to be taking advantage of somebody else’s situation like that. That’s just not in our DNA," he said.

The executive highlighted that Microsoft is betting big on cloud services, so full pledged security services are mandatory. He emphasized that users also need to make sure they're secure when using online services by changing their passwords regularly, not using them on all websites, and more.

"It turns out a lot of people use the same password for multiple sites on the internet, so it’s just a warning to people to make sure that you’re diligent and that you use different passwords on different sites because now there are people out there who know what the password is for a certain email address and they can just go try a bunch of other services and just walk right in the front door. So it is the consumer’s responsibility also to do a number of things to try to protect their data," he explained.

In the end, Durking says that Xbox Live users are expecting the service to run constantly and without a fault, so the company needs to make sure that no such extended outages will happen, no matter the actual cause.

"[Xbox Live] is obviously very important to our consumers. It’s part of the value proposition of why consumers buy our gaming consoles... So they want that to be on just like you want your phone to be on. And so we have that obligation and we’ve been diligently, not only in terms of our processes, which we leverage heavily from the company, but just in terms of our people resource and all that so we do everything we can to protect our consumers’ data."

"Like in society, you can’t always protect everything. There are people who are going to want to disrupt things and you can't always perfectly protect against every scenario, but we’re going to make sure we do everything to we can to be sure we’re as secure as we possibly can be."