Security Breach Will Cost Sony Estimated 171.7 Million Dollars

Video game publisher and hardware developer Sony has announced that it is revising its forecasted financial results for the coming year and that it expects to use the equivalent of 171.7 million dollars in order to cover the costs of the recent PlayStation Network-centered security breach.

The cost of the security breach, estimated at about 14 billion Yen, is dwarfed by the losses that will be linked to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which are expected to cost the company 150 billion yen or 1.8 billion dollars.

The costs for the security breach include the new information theft protection that is offered to customers, the new Welcome Back program and the support services that were offered in the last month.

A statement from Sony says, “So far, we have not received any confirmed reports of customer identity theft issues, nor confirmed any misuse of credit cards from the cyber-attack. Those are key variables, and if that changes, the costs could change.”

It adds, “In addition, in connection with the data breach, class action lawsuits have been filed against Sony and certain of its subsidiaries and regulatory inquiries have begun; however, those are all at a preliminary stage, so we are not able to include the possible outcome of any of them in our results forecast for the fiscal year ending March 2012 at this moment.”

This means that, in the long run and if the court cases go against it, Sony might end up paying much more than 171.7 million dollars for the PSN security breach.

For the fiscal year that ended on March 31, Sony is expecting to post a loss of 260 billion Yen, which is the equivalent of 3.2 billion dollars.

In the long run, Sony might also be affected by the fact that potential customers might steer clear of its services, especially those that require credit card information, for fear of a new set of hacker attacks.