It was a matter of time of course, but either Xbox Live or Playstation Network were bound to be hit once by hackers. It just shows that internet fraud is here to stay and it can hit every company. The nightmare for Sony is extremely big and will cost the company billions of Dollars. The stock markets already weigh in on the PSN outage. Today, Sony shares fell 4.5 percent to 2,260 ($27.71) on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
The company is doing everything it can to salvage its reputation and keep its customers. So far, no credit card companies have seen any related activity to the breach yet, but that of course is no guarantee that nothing has been obtained.
One of the major points of interest is how Sony deals with this incident. Up until this point it is fair to say that Sony is keeping one thing in mind: communicate with the customers and let them know what is happening. This is a very important thing to focus. Your customer is your most prized asset and communication is always key.
Depending on how you are set up with your online payments processor, the Sony situation shows another area of importance as well: PCI DSS
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a worldwide information security standard defined by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. The standard was created to help payment card industry organizations that process card payments prevent credit card fraud through increased controls around data and its exposure to compromise. The standard applies to all organisations that hold, process, or exchange cardholder information from any card branded with the logo of one of the card brands. (source wikipedia)
In other words, the PCI standard is created to make sure that companies that store customer data make sure that their security standards are sufficient to prevent the data to be compromised. If your business is not PCI compliant you may run the risk of not being able to process credit card transactions anymore. Consult with a professional to make sure to get PCI compliant.
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