Sony chief executive says sorry over hacking
Sir Howard Stringer, the chief executive of Sony, has issued an apology over the secrutiy breaches which saw 100 million gamers' personal details obtained by hackers.
British born Stringer commented on the hacking attack for the first time in a blog post on the Playstation website.
"As a company we - and I - apologise for the inconvenience and concern caused by this attack," Stringer said.
He added that teams were "working round the clock" to restore Playstation Network services taken offline in the wake of the hacking and said there had been "no confirmed evidence" that credit card details or other personal information had been misused.
On the contentious issue of why the company failed to notify its customers about the hacking sooner, Stringer said: "I know some believe we should have notified our customers earlier than we did. It’s a fair question.
"As soon as we discovered the potential scope of the intrusion, we shut down the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services and hired some of the best technical experts in the field to determine what happened. I wish we could have gotten the answers we needed sooner, but forensic analysis is a complex, time-consuming process."
He added that the firm would increase its defences when services come back online and that each user would now be covered by a $1m identity theft insurance policy.