Sony Blows Off Congressional Hearing on Data Breaches
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The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
CREDIT: Diliff/Creative Commons |
Credit: Wikimedia/David Iliff
Sony's bringing in the big guns to crack the case of who broke into its servers -- while at the same time telling the U.S. Congress, "Thanks, but we'll talk later."
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that three security firms, including one run by an ex-Navy investigator, have been enlisted to find out who got into servers housing Sony's PlayStation Network, Qriocity and Sony Online Entertainment last month.
An estimated 102 million accounts were exposed, revealing names, addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses. Sony says that in most cases credit card data was encrypted, but about 23,000 European credit, debit and bank account numbers stored on an "old database" were compromised.
[What to Do If You're Affected by the Sony Data Breach ]
The company refused to appear, however, at a Wednesday morning hearing held by the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade concerning the Sony and Epsilon data breaches .
"We informed the committee that we could not appear as early as this Wednesday because of our ongoing intensive investigation and management of this criminal cyberattack," a company spokesman told the New York Times via email.
It did respond, via letter, to a list of 13 detailed questions posed by the subcommittee last Friday. But according to the Wall Street Journal's account, Sony's response didn't really divulge any new information, except that the FBI has been working with Sony since April 22.
Subcommittee chairwoman Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., was not thrilled by Sony's brush-off.
"Sony ... says it's too busy with its ongoing investigation to appear," she said in a prepared statement. "Well, what about the millions of American consumers who are still twisting in the wind because of these breaches? They deserve some straight answers, and I am determined to get them."
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