Sony hires US information security chief
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Following hacking scandal, Sony hires ex-official from the US Department of Homeland Security as new chief information security officer
Japanese electrnoics giant Sony has hired Philip Reitinger, previously the Deputy Under Secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security, as its new chief information security officer.
The move comes months after personal data of more than 100 million users of Sony's online gaming services, including credit card numbers and users' names and addresses.
Reitinger will be responsible for securing the information held by Sony and will oversee privacy and network security across the entire company, the company said in a statement.
Previously, Reitinger has held positions such as the director of the US National Cyber Security Centre, and senior security strategist at Microsoft. Trained as a lawyer and with a degree in computer science, Reitinger made his way into cyber crime through a position as an attorney with the computer crime section of the US Department of Justice.
In the month after the main attack, hacking group LulzSec stole a database of 1 million personal details - including email addresses, passwords and home addresses - from a Sony website. "Every bit of data we took wasn't encrypted. Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plaintext, which means it's just a matter of taking it. This is disgraceful and insecure: they were asking for it." the group said at the time.
Sony shares have fallen 55% since the hacking was revealed at the end of April.
