Safe AND secure: Sony hires former Homeland Security bigwig Philip Reitinger

by Steven Mostyn - Sep 7 2011, 14:10

Following on from confident security reassurances offered up to jaded customers by Sony boss Howard Stringer, the recently battered Japanese consumer electronics giant has today announced the high-profile hiring of Philip Reitinger.

Although the average PlayStation 3 owner may not have heard of Reitinger, he arrives at Sony with some fairly hefty credentials on his resume—not least time spent serving as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity Center.

Now in the fold at Sony, Reitinger has been tasked with bringing his considerable expertise to bear as the company’s senior vice president and chief information security officer—which essentially means protecting against a repeat of April’s spate of hugely damaging hack attacks.

According to Sony, Reitinger “will oversee information security, privacy and Internet safety across the company, coordinating closely with key headquarters groups and working in partnership with the information security community to bring the best ideas and approaches to Sony.”

Speaking earlier this week at the IFA 2011 trade show in Berlin, Sony president and CEO Howard Stringer said that the PlayStation Network’s summer of discontent is now over and the once-crippled service is now functioning better than ever.

Several of Sony’s online properties were struck by hacking collective Anonymous in April of this year, which resulted in the compromising of tens of millions of customer accounts.

Reports suggest Sony has thus-far spent somewhere in the vicinity of $175 million USD in restructuring and reinforcing its affected divisions (i.e., PlayStation Network, Sony Online Entertainment and Qriocity).

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