he data breach that hit Sony's PlayStation Network resulted from a "very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber-attack designed to steal personal and credit card information for illegal purposes," a Sony executive said.
In a letter to members of the House Commerce Committee released Wednesday, Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC, defended the company's handling of the breach.
Addressing criticism that the company waited too long to inform customers, Hirai said Sony waited until it had a solid understanding and confirmation of the extent of the attack and its implications.
"Throughout the process, Sony Network Entertainment America was very concerned that announcing partial or tentative information to consumers could cause confusion and lead them to take unnecessary actions if the information was not fully corroborated by forensic evidence," he wrote.
Hirai's letter said the company knows who is responsible for the attack and is working with outside security and forensics consultants and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The letter also noted that the breach came on the heels of large-scale, coordinated denial-of-service attacks launched by a loose international group of hackers called Anonymous against several Sony operations in retaliation for a complaint filed by the company against a hacker in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
On Sunday Sony discovered that intruders had planted a file named "Anonymous" on one server that had been breached, Hirai said. Late last year, Anonymous distributed hacking software to be used against companies that stopped doing business with the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks after it released thousands of classified government documents.
Hirai's letter added that Sony may not have immediately detected the PlayStation breach in part because its security teams were busy trying to defend against the denial-of-service attacks.
"Whether those who participated in the denial-of-service attacks were conspirators or whether they were simply duped into providing cover for a very clever thief, we may never know," Hirai wrote.
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