After meeting with Sony twice this month, Kazushige Nobutani, director of the Media and Content Industry department at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, told Dow Jones it was waiting for Sony to achieve two things:
"The first is preventative measures. As of May 13, Sony was incomplete in exercising measures that they said they will do on the May 1 press conference," he said.
Secondly, "There were similar cases in the past that were caused by other firms, and we are asking Sony whether their measures are good enough when compared to countermeasures taken in the past," he said.
Sony Japan apologized to its customers at its PlayStation blog, which instructs users to download a firmware update, v.3.61, on Monday to update their passwords. It is still in discussions with various agencies to resume the service, the company wrote.
On Saturday evening, Sony posted firmware update instructions for customers in the U.S. and Europe to change their passwords. Sony also announced it would begin a phased return of PlayStation Network services following a three-week outage, which was prompted by a security breach that forced the company to take down the network.
"Please note that these services will take a bit of time to be turned on and rolled out to the whole country," Sony wrote in a blog post on Saturday.
The company is also offering customers free enrollment in identity-theft protection programs in countries where they are available, and has promised a "welcome back package" sometime in the future.