Kotaku reports that in a shareholders meeting held earlier today, Sony Corporation CEO Howard Stringer has stated that the company was attacked by hackers in May April because the company “tried to protect our IP (intellectual property), [and] our content, in this case videogames.”
Though there were calls for his resignation at the shareholder meeting for his performance during the outage of the Playstation Network, Stringer explained that the attacks were launched because “there are those that don’t want us to protect [our games], they want everything to be free.” Stringer had previously stated that Sony does not differentiate between consoles that have been hacked in order to run a different operating system, and those that have been hacked in order to run pirated games.
Following the external intrusion, Sony was forced to take the Playstation Network service offline for a total of 23 days. More than 77 million consumer records were obtained during the intrusion, though no unauthorized use of this data has yet been confirmed.