Playstation network to remain offline in city
Hong Kong is one of only three places in the world where Sony's hacked PlayStation Network services will not be restored soon.
Sony's office in Hong Kong said it needed to clear up issues with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner - which has launched an investigation - before resuming service.
Yesterday the commission said Sony had not met demands it made in April.
'[We] are still waiting for Sony to demonstrate that the vulnerabilities of their system have been exhaustively identified and [that] effective remedial measures have been taken to prevent recurrence of the hacking incident,' a commission spokesman said.
The Japanese electronics giant suffered a massive online attack on its PlayStation network service in April, affecting customers around the world, including about 400,000 users in Hong Kong.
The unprecedented attack may have compromised the credit card details of users, but no Hong Kong users reported any losses.
'We have privacy issues to clear up with the commissioner,' a Sony spokesman said. Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea will be the only places left out when global services resume this weekend.
Sony shut down the network on April 19, saying it had been the target of what it called an 'illegal and unauthorised intrusion'.
Privacy Commissioner Allan Chiang Yam-wang urged Sony on April 27 to provide a detailed account of the cyberattack, as well as its data security measures, for the privacy watchdog's investigation.
The Japanese electronics giant partially resumed online gaming services on May 15 in the Americas and Europe and on May 28 in much of Asia. Details for the resumption of PlayStation Network services in Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea, and a full resumption of Qriocity - a separate Sony music service that was also affected by the attack - would be announced at a later date, Sony said. The company said that since being hacked in April, it had 'implemented considerable security enhancements to the network infrastructure, as well as conducting testing of the payment process and commerce functions'.
Sony was attacked in one of the biggest breaches of data security in the history of the internet, in which the usernames, passwords, addresses and dates of birth of more than 100 million people may have been compromised.
The company later suffered attacks on more of its websites worldwide, including in Greece, Thailand and Indonesia, and on the Canadian site of its mobile phone company, Sony Ericsson.
The culprits behind the attack have not yet been identified.
