News Tonight

Japanese electronics major, Sony has said that it is ready to resume some of the PlayStation Network services while it is working to ascertain the source of the attack that caused the outage.

Sony Computer Entertainment has earlier admitted that that attacks may have accessed some private user information. PlayStation internet services went offline on Wednesday and have remained down. The company had said that the outage is due to an "external intrusion," but did not announce a probable date when services will be restored.

Sony is rebuilding the service that allows it’s more than 75 million PlayStation customers come together and play videogames and chat together on the internet. Sony has repeatedly said that there is no evidence that the hackers gained access to credit card details of the users. However, the company said that where customers are charged a fee for reissuing credit cards it will take responsibility for those charges.

Sony pointed out that credit card data was encrypted and is thus safe from the hackers. Executive deputy president Kazuo Hirai pointed out that the hackers compromised 78 million accounts on the network. Out of these the company only had credit card details of about 10 million users.

Sony’s Shinji Hasejima, CIO said that attack was based on a “known vulnerability” in the non-specified Web application server platform used in the PSN but management had not been aware of the vulnerability that was exploited. He added that the company has created a new executive-level security position, that of chief information security officer, “to improve and enhance such aspects”.