Sony has revealed that the hacker attack suffered by the PlayStation Network earlier this year actually benefited the company as it served to wake up dormant customers and get them more connected to the online service as a whole.


Sony was faced with a serious problem back in April, when hackers attacked the PlayStation Netowrk service and managed to jeopardize almost all of the 77+ million accounts. The Japanese company took down the PSN completely, promising to rebuild its infrastructure in a much more secure manner.

After that, it offered lots of great deals including a Welcome Back package with free games for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Network.

This, coupled with the variety of other deals and the new, more secure image of the PSN, meant lots of older customers started using it more often, at least according to So Saida, the senior director of global business strategy and development at Sony, who talked with TechRadar about the hacker attack and how it wound up drawing in new customers for Sony's services.

"Our outage has woken up our dormant customers, we have improved the platform, the content, how you can access your content," Saida explained. "We have increased the revenue of games by 14 per cent. We have acquired 800,000 active users for Music Unlimited, 5 per cent revenue for Video Unlimited and we now have 3 million accounts for this service. We created the welcome back package, which is one of the reasons for the upsurge in activity on the site."

Saida also emphasized the new security measures taken by Sony and how its reaction was always to share information and details with customers, instead of operating behind closed doors.

"We have put various security issues in place, moved the data centre, automated log-in can now be blocked, we have monitoring system so we can detect it much more sooner. We also have the insurance scheme to protect those customers. We also notify customers if the password strength is not enough.

"Sony has been attacked but we have been upfront and honest and informed the world about what has happened," Saida explained. "Network companies get hacked all the time � but do they make a noise about it? This is happening all of the time, it happened to us and it is about educating the consumers, making sure that they have their ID protected."

Sony explained more than once that activity levels on the PlayStation Network are much higher than before, demonstrating that users have gotten past the hacking scandal.