Sony CEO ignores shareholder request to step down

At a recent shareholders' meeting, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer claimed the company was targeted by hackers in the popularized PS3 jailbreak and ensuing PSN outage. The hacks against Sony's servers exposed personal and credit card information of 77 million PSN and Qriocity accounts. The CEO declined to see Sony as anything but a victim and portrayed the hackers as nothing but frustrated pirates.

"We believe that we first became the subject of attack because we tried to protect our IP [intellectual property], our content, in this case video games," Stringer said on Tuesday at the shareholder meeting in response to a question.

Sony sued hacker George Hotz for copyright infringement and circumventing PlayStation 3's protection schemes when the young hacker posted instructions on public sites for other users to hack their own PS3 consoles. This hack would let gamers run self-made apps on their consoles. The case was settled and Sony's systems were hacked about a week later, exposing the sensitive user information.

Sony argued the information exposed by Hotz would make pirating its games easier, while Hotz said users, as owners of the PS3 console, have the right to modify what they own. Stringer didn't talk about this aspect of the case and ignored Hotz' deliberate attempts to jailbreak the PS3 without aiding piracy.

The CEO also sidestepped a request by a shareholder to step down as the head of the company in light of what is the world's largest Internet security breach.

By Electronista Staff

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sony, industry, security, PS3, PlayStation, hacks, PSN, Qriocity