PlayStation Network Down Update: Did Sony Know About The Scale of the PSN Attack Earlier We Thought?

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We covered the PSN outage scandal a lot thoroughly than we would have wished for. In fact we wished this never happened to Sony customers since it’s always a pain in the rear for consumers to go through such annoying times. And amidst all the shouting done, on good grounds, by Sony consumers affected by the outage, we often heard people saying that Sony must have known, a while before making it public, that the situation was, in fact pretty serious and potentially harmful for its PSN subscribers

Now we hear that the Japanese government seems to think that Sony deceived everyone with its May 1 announcement. A government report says that Sony basically confirmed the seriousness of the hack on April 25, internally, but on the very next day the company issued a press release downplaying everything by saying it couldn’t “rule out the possibility” of personal data having been leaked and accessed by unwanted third parties.

This government report opens the doors to all sorts of conspiracy theories, or better said, confirms some of the ones that have been in circulation ever since the whole thing happened. 2011 will certainly be a year Sony will not want to remember, and it’s more than clear that, beyond all the excuses (even at E3) and the Welcome Back packages, Sony’s reputation has been seriously tarnished this spring.

The company answered to this report that it didn’t want to scare its users at the time it initially found about the importance of the attacks, as it didn’t know exactly what kind of personal data was lost:

“We hadn’t figured out (at that time) what kind of data had been leaked. If only passwords and IDs (were breached), they cannot be considered personal information, and so we didn’t want to bewilder our customers.”

This can be a valid argument, up to a point, although I don’t think it was rocket science to assume that third parties attacking Sony would have been satisfied with snatching just PSN user IDs and passwords while inside Sony’s servers, don’t you think? And hence a fair warning could have been issued just a little earlier. Of course, on the other hand, how many people have had their money and/or money stolen since the attacks?