Sony: Protecting IP triggered hacks

Sony president and CEO Sir Howard Stringer has claimed that the company was targeted by hackers because it was trying to protect its IP.

Speaking to shareholders in Tokyo, the exec was questioned about the PSN security breach that resulted in the theft of millions of users’ personal and payment information, Kotaku reports.

We believe that we first became the subject of attack because we tried to protect our IP, our content, in this case video games,” he said.

These are our corporate assets, and there are those that don’t want us to protect them, they want everything to be free.”

It is believed that Stringer was referring to PS3 owners that modified their consoles to run pirated games – a modification that many consumers claim is only used to run the Linux feature that Sony removed. Back in January, custom PS3 firmware was released that restored this function.