Sony and the IT Pirates

Ambroise Garneray Kent battling Confiance

In the 16th and 17th century piracy was at is peak. With enormous wealth being transported from America to Spain pirates in the Caribbean saw a significant source of profit. As if this wasn't enough Spain also had the Barbary Corsairs in the Mediterranean to fear. People of that period surely had to sympathize with the Habsburgs as today's people surely sympathize with Sony.

When Sony announced a breach in the PlayStation Network on April 26th 75 million users were surprised, shocked and indignant. They admitted "a compromise of personal information as a result of an illegal intrusion on its systems". This meant personal information (names, addresses, etc.), account information (login names, passwords, transactional histories) and even credit card information of 75 million Sony costumers are in a place were there shouldn't be.

This is inconvenient both for the company and for their costumers. Yet the damage is not that big as media would have you believe. Analysts predict $ 3 million a week loss in profit plus whatever they need to give to restore trust (predicted to cost less than $ 50 million). For a $ 88 billion a year revenue company "that's hardly back-snapping" as Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter puts it.

There is a naive opinion that a corporation of such extend as Sony was not prepared for a situation like this. In the end the circumstances are fairly simple, the company decided to save money because the probability of a breach like this to happen and its financial impacts were evaluated as small.

If you need someone to sympathize with perhaps a better choice are the users of the PSN? Of course IT piracy seems more drastic than other forms of information mining but all is fair in love and war. It is absurd to mix emotions and business. People should be aware that the minute they give their information to some IT service they risk its abuse. That is why there are protocols of credit card theft. Corporations have been monitoring e-mails, personal websites and SNS profiles for a long time in order to get valuable information for themselves. In the world of business there are only interests. 

Honestly I can't see why a situation like this caused so much media fuss. Business intelligence has been around for decades. Costumer information is the new gold.

If you are a PSN user the question is how to protect yourself form IT pirates in the future? Of course you could use a alias, fake username, fake address and someone elses credit card but the actual solution is far more simple. You can learn it from history, when Spain is down turn to France/England or in this case just buy an X-box. :) Chances are they already bought your information.