Sony alleged to have neglected security; Will face lawsuit

As the PlayStation Network recovers from back-to-back hacker attacks, Sony will face a lawsuit filed by three men alleging Sony was well aware of the inadequacy of its security system. According to a Reuters report, the litigation was filed earlier this week in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

The trio, Felix Cortorreal, Jacques Daoud Jr., and Jimmy Cortorreal, all of New York, said in court documents that Sony knew that its inadequate security systems placed it at an increased risk for the attack, which directly and proximately caused the theft of its customers' personal information and a month long interruption of PSN.

The plaintiffs alleged that while Sony spends lavishly on the security of development servers and intellectual property, they failed to safeguard the interests of customers by not securing their sensitive personal data.

The three said, Sony fired a significant number of employees immediately before the security breach, in order to cut costs.

More than 77 million customer accounts of PSN and Qriocity service were exposed in an attack on ten of the company's servers in San Diego. Sony Online Entertainment was also target to a similar attack which compromised 25 million customer accounts. Sony came under fire for not notifying their customers, after the security breach, about the stolen data which included customer names, e-mail addresses, billing addresses, phone numbers, genders, and birth dates.

The lawsuit asks for reimbursement for PlayStation consoles, PSN fees, restitution, exemplary damages, and appropriate credit monitoring.

Looks like the free gifts offered to customers when the PSN was back online aren't enough. Sony is yet to issue a statement regarding the lawsuit.