Sony

Sony announced today that it has hired Philip Reitinger, the former director of the U.S. National Cyber Security Center, for the newly created post of chief information security officer.

Do you remember that massive hacking of the Sony PlayStation Network a few months back? Sony clearly believes in locking the barn door after someone made off with the horse and had their way with the stable maid.

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The Register is reporting that the next Sony Readers will have the entire Harry Potter series when they hit store shelves this fall. According to its sources, the new Sony Readers will have the series some time in November, just in time for the Christmas season. There’s no word on price or exactly which countries the bundle will be sold in.

I would recommend taking this report with a grain of salt. The Register is not very careful about getting the details right; I’ve caught them in obvious mistakes before.

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Sony is beginning to face the consequences of what was one of the largest data breaches in history. Last week, the Sony Play Station Network was hacked into causing a shut down of a gaming network that is three times the size of NetFlix. Now users are taking action.

Alabama resident Kristopher Johns filed the first class action lawsuit against Sony in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Information Week has more: “The lawsuit alleges that Sony ‘failed to encrypt data and establish adequate firewalls to handle a server intrusion contingency, failed to provide prompt and adequate warnings of security breaches, and unreasonably delayed in bringing the PSN service back on line.’ It also accused Sony of violating the Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standard, which prohibits companies from storing cardholder data.”

With this kind of data breach happening on Sony’s gaming network, I’m wondering how safe your information is in the Sony book store. Or in iBooks, Kindle and Nook for that matter. All of these stores let you easily store your credit card information so that you can download eBooks with one click, but perhaps it would be safer not to store this information with these companies and instead get out your credit card each time you want to shop. It might cut down on impulse buys as well.

Sony had to shut down it’s PlayStation Network after the network was hacked earlier this month. Now the company has come out and said that customer data may have been stolen.

Businessweek has more: “Sony Corp. warned its 77 million PlayStation Network and Qriocity online service customers that their credit-card data, billing addresses and other personal information may have been stolen by a hacker.”

While this is not likely to affect the Sony eBook business, the hack raises questions about the security of personal data being stored in the databases of companies that we frequent. Sony, Amazon and Apple all store our credit card numbers making it very easy to buy eBooks at the touch of a button. If a database as large as Sony’s can get hacked –to put the size in perspective, the PlayStation Network has about three times as many users as Netflix– should we be storing all of this data in our digital accounts? What do you think?