Sony Sued Over PSN Data Breach, Failure to Disclose

Sony is now the target of a lawsuit over negligence in protecting users' data. This isn't surprising, considering Sony only just admitted that users' personal data may have been compromised in the recent PlayStation Network hack.

Kristopher Johns of Birmingham, Alabama, filed the negligence suit on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

On Tuesday, the company said a hacker broke into the PSN and Qriocity servers between April 17 and 19 and potentially gained access to players' personal information, including, possibly, stored credit card information. The company hopes to begin restoring services within a week.

Sony waited too long?

In the suit, Johns says the company waited too long in informing its more than 77 million users of the breach. "[Sony] unduly delayed or failed to inform in a timely fashion the appropriate entities and consumers whose data was compromised of their vulnerabilities and exposure to credit card (or other) fraud," reads the filing. It goes on to say that this delay may have exacerbated the problem.

Security experts are already calling this one of the largest data breaches ever, and the scope of information in the hands of attackers is worrisome. "This provides potential ammunition for almost any type of attack," Dr. Paul Judge, president of security firm Barracuda Networks, told USA Today on Wednesday.