Sony pledged after April’s network breach to provide affected customers with one year’s worth of free identity theft protection, a promise it is now making good on. An enrollment page has launched on the company’s website which offers a simple a simple, one-step process to get the ball rolling. Simply enter the e-mail address tied to your Sony account into the two text boxes on the page and click submit. Then, sometime in the 72 hours that follow, you should receive an e-mail containing an activation code for the AllClear ID PLUS protection plan from Debix. In addition to receiving alerts when suspicious activity relating to your online persona is detected, the plan also offers free identity theft insurance coverage and on-call assistance from fraud investigators.
Meanwhile, Sony continues to engage in an ongoing process of damage control following yesterday’s news of another network breach, this time on Sony Ericsson’s Canadian e-shop site. This has been ongoing since April 20, when the PlayStation Network, Qriocity and Sony Online Entertainment services were shut down for one month following a network breach. Attacks on various Sony properties have followed since then, with the Sony Ericsson Canada breach only being the latest.
This whole incident has become a truly difficult thing to watch. Whatever opinions you may have of Sony’s initial response to the April security fail, the situation has very quickly snowballed into a concentrated, sustained attack on a scale that far outweighs any perceived wrongdoing that might have inspired such an action in the first place. The first strike was bad enough, an unprecedented intrusion that exposed the personal data of more than 100 million users. The continuing assault simply adds insult to injury, a repeated slap in the face to Sony, which is struggling simultaneously to keep up and allay customer concerns about security in the future.
