Hacking is "a threat" not just to companies, but "to the very fabric of society," says Hirai

Sony deputy president Kaz Hirai has said attacks like the one which occurred to the firm PSN are not just a threat to companies, but a threat to "the very fabric of society," as well.

Speaking in an interview with Guardian UK at E3, Hirai called for a global effort in the fight against data theft and external breaches and said that various governments need to step in do something about it as well.

"Just generally speaking, whether it's PSN or any other non-Sony services, in the past week several companies and organisations also got hacked as well," he said. "I think there are reports that the FBI got hacked. So this isn't something that is a Microsoft issue or a Sony issue or limited to one or two companies. This is actually a lot bigger than that. It's large enough to the extent that we're talking about any and all companies, organisations and entities that deal in the online space – which is pretty much everyone at this stage, isn't it?

"It's a threat, not just to Sony or a couple of other companies, but to the very fabric of society. Therefore it requires individuals and companies to be very vigilant, which goes without saying, and we need help from various government, various enforcement agencies and legislation in certain instances as well. And this needs to be a worldwide effort."

Hirai also defending Sony's response time in informing customers that their data may have been compromised, saying that the firm did not wait "a week," but were instead "very aggressive" in the way it tried to get the information out to consumers "as quickly as possible."

"As you probably know, there are laws in a number of states in the US that have legal requirements which, in a nutshell, mean you can't just go out there and drop a statement like that without being able to answer some fundamental questions," he said. "You need to do your due diligence before you make a statement. We obviously wanted to make sure that we met those requirements.We also wanted, just as good practice, to try and garner as much information as possible before making any announcements.

"So I don't think we 'waited' a week. I think it took a week to make sure that we had, at least what we thought was enough information that was credible at the time before we made any announcements.

"As you probably know, when we made the announcement that we restored the services, we had moved the data centres and we basically have done everything to bring our practices at least in line with industry standards or better. I'm not going to get into details of what we did and have not done for security reasons. But I can tell you that, as far as the PS3 is concerned, we've done everything that we thought we could to make sure we're protecting our consumers' data as aggressively as possible."

Sony announced today that it will fully restore all Qriocity services today in all serviced territories, excluding Japan, meaning that all PlayStation Network and Qriocity services which were shut down on April 20 will be available.