With two online game services down and 100 million accounts possibly compromised, Sony is mulling a reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the hackers, according to AllThingsDigital.
Sony hasn’t reached a final decision on whether to offer the reward. The options shows that the company is still taking a hard line on pursuing hackers, even as Anonymous, the hacktivist group, considers more attacks in the coming days against different Sony sites.
The PlayStation Networks, which has 77 million registered users, has been down fore more than two weeks as a result of a hacker attack. The Station, an online network for 24 million PC online gamers, has been down since Monday. Sony has apologized multiple times for the outage and says it is beefing up security.
If Sony moves forward on the reward, it will do so in cooperation with law enforcement agencies such as the FBI. Sony is hoping to knock loose information about who carried out the attack on April 19. Our timeline on the sequence of events is here. Meanwhile, Sony said that accusations by computer security expert Gene Spafford during a Congressional hearing Thursday were wrong.
Spafford said that Sony was running outdated versions of Web server software and had not been using a firewall on its servers. In a statement, Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold, said the company was using updated software and had “multiple security measures in place,” including firewalls. Anonymous is rumored to be planning a new attack.