PlayStation Network Attack Was Surprising, Sony Boss Says

The hacker attack on the PlayStation Network was surprising, according to Sony President Sir Howard Stringer, who said that his company didn't expect a great and free service like the PSN to be attacked by evildoers.

Sony was forced to take down its PlayStation Network after a hacker attack last month, in order to analyze the damages done by the cyberattackers and rebuild it in a more secure fashion.

Now, as the PSN is being brought back online around the world, Sony boss Sir Howard Stringer told Bloomberg about the attack and how he felt surprised that hackers would take down a free online service that offered plenty of features for all of its users around the world.

"Obviously our network security didn’t stop the attack and we’re trying to understand why, and we’ve made big strides in bolstering our security," he said. "We have a network that gave people services free. It didn’t seem like the likeliest place for an attack."

Stringer said that his company believed it had a "good, robust security" system implemented on its PSN, but that wasn't enough to protect it from this massive intrusion.

As such, the rebuilt PSN will be even better, so that such an issue won't manifest itself ever again.

The PSN outage and the whole scandal may have cost Sony as much as $171 million, according to a recent estimate, but things are starting to return to normal, with the company bringing back the last major piece of the PSN, the PlayStation Store, later this week.

After this, the special "Welcome Back" program will be offered to PSN users affected by the outage, consisting of free access to the PlayStation Plus subscription service, entry into a special identity theft protection program, or free games for the PlayStation 3 and PSP consoles.