Hirai: Hacking threatens "the very fabric of society"

Sony deputy president and PlayStation boss Kaz Hirai has claimed that online hacks pose a risk to society itself.

In an interview with the Guardian, Hirai said of the recent PSN security crisis that: "this isn't something that is a Microsoft issue or a Sony issue or limited to one or two companies. This is actually a lot bigger than that."

Observing that the likes of the FBI had also seen recent online security breaches, he felt that "It's large enough to the extent that we're talking about any and all companies, organisations and entities that deal in the online space – which is pretty much everyone at this stage, isn't it?

"It's a threat, not just to Sony or a couple of other companies, but to the very fabric of society. Therefore it requires individuals and companies to be very vigilant, which goes without saying, and we need help from various government, various enforcement agencies and legislation in certain instances as well. And this needs to be a worldwide effort."

Hirai also disputed that Sony had unnecessarily bided its timed before revealing the nature of the PSN outage to its users. "You can't just go out there and drop a statement like that without being able to answer some fundamental questions... So I don't think we "waited" a week. I think it took a week to make sure that we had, at least what we thought was enough information that was credible at the time before we made any announcements."

He claimed that the person or persons behind the PSN hack had not yet been identified, but that Sony was working with the FBI and other law organisations in the hope of tracking down the culprit.

In response to whether he believed smartphones and tablets posed a threat to the upcoming PSVita, Hirai argued that "We're catering to a completely different market," and that the PlayStation Suite for Android was Sony's answer to the rise of phone-based gaming.