8

Add to My News

Story by Nathan Grayson

Thu, Jun 23, 2011 | 05:19 BST

Xbox COO on PSN hack: “We don’t wish that upon anybody”

So a bad thing happened to PSN recently. You may have heard about it. Given that it has ears everywhere, Microsoft also caught wind of Sony’s no good, very bad month. Make no mistake, however: the console-maker’s not popping any champagne bottles over its bitter rival’s darkest of hours.

“It’s bad for the industry that this has happened to Sony. It’s very, very bad. It’s very damaging. So we don’t wish that upon anybody and you’ve seen we’ve been actually pretty quiet on the subject because we don’t want to appear to even be looking to be taking advantage of somebody else’s situation like that. That’s just not in our DNA,” Xbox COO Dennis Durkin told IndustryGamers.

Of course, with the recent hackstravaganza that’s caught the gaming world with its pants down and orbiting another planet, Microsoft’s well aware of the fact that it could be next. But it’s certainly not going down without a fight – and, of course, hopefully not at all.

“[Xbox Live] is obviously very important to our consumers. It’s part of the value proposition of why consumers buy our gaming consoles… So they want that to be on just like you want your phone to be on. And so we have that obligation and we’ve been diligently, not only in terms of our processes, which we leverage heavily from the company, but just in terms of our people resource and all that so we do everything we can to protect our consumers’ data,” he explained.

“Like in society, you can’t always protect everything. There are people who are going to want to disrupt things and you can’t always perfectly protect against every scenario, but we’re going to make sure we do everything to we can to be sure we’re as secure as we possibly can be. And thankfully – I’m grateful to be part of a company like Microsoft, who has such deep investments across its whole ecosystem that we leverage. Because it’s an industry challenge and it’s something that we all have to get better at.”

May we suggest implementing a system similar to BioShock’s hacking minigames? Man, we hated those things.