Congress Asks Sony to Address Unanswered Questions

Members of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade sent Sony a follow-up letter after the company failed to answer a number of questions regarding an attack on its PlayStation Network last month.

In the letter, which was addressed to Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony, lawmakers thanked Sony for answering some of the previous questions the group asked last month, but said it still had a number of questions to answer. The original letter was sent on April 29. The committee has been actively discussing bringing new legislation to Congress that would protect consumers in future privacy breaches.

Separately, Sony brought its PlayStation network back online over the weekend and Howard Stringer, Sony’s chief executive, argued that Sony had responded to the attack in a timely manner. When asked why Sony waited almost a week to notify customers that personal information and credit card data had possibly been stolen in the attack, Stringer said: “We reported quickly.” He said that the attack was the largest of its kind on a company, and that “we still have a lot of investigation to do to find out how this happened, but we’re not there yet.”