Eternally Optimistic, Sony Exec Calls Recent Hacking Incident a “Great Experience”

Although some might see a glass with just a few drops of water, Sony executive Tim Schaaff estimated the glass as roughly half full.

Speaking at the MobileBeat conference on Wednesday, Schaaff called the massive hacking attack against the PlayStation Network “a great experience” from which he has learned a lot. For those with a very short memory, the PlayStation Network was largely down for weeks and weeks following an intrusion that exposed the service and its 77 million members.

“It’s been a great experience,” Schaaff said during a talk on Wednesday at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco. Schaaff did concede that he wasn’t looking for another great experience any time soon. “I’d not like to do it again,” he said. “One time is enough.”

Schaaff, the former Apple executive who now heads a year-old unit overseeing all of Sony’s device networking activities, said that the company has seen its PlayStation Network customers all come back despite taking the network down for several weeks.

“It’s a pretty crazy event that we went through but we are back strong,” Schaaff said. He added that the company initially feared it alone was the target of the attacks, but has breathed a bit of a sigh of relief to learn it was one of many targets, with plenty of other institutions on the hit list.