The outage which has affected millions of psn users of the last few weeks was the result of an external intrusion from an unknown hacker group – some say it was the group known as Anon yet as time went by they have denied involvement. The theft of personal details happened between April 17th and April 19th, yet Sony did not disclose the intrusion to its users until May 4th. An estimated 77 million accounts had personal details stolen from them surpassing previous hacks of any kind on any records. Its no surprise that Sony have had so much negative press through the incident, many governments and agencies accuse Sony of mishandling personal information and lacking to keep its users safe. On April 20th Sony turned off the network and its Qriocity services, stating that it would be back within the week – now on May the 9th it still all remains offline.
At the moment Sony claim they are aggressively trying to track down the hackers who perpetrated the attack, yet even with various law enforcement agencies on the case they have not been found and the service remains offline. Sony have stated that the attack is a criminal cyber attack and that it will remain offline until they have completed extensive security tests. When asked to report to congress Sony had the following to say about the on-going attack on their network.
“Sony Network Entertainment America is continuing its investigation into this criminal intrusion, and more detailed information could be discovered during this process. We are reluctant to make full details publicly available because the information is the subject of an on-going criminal investigation and also the information could be used to exploit vulnerabilities in systems other than Sony's that have similar architecture to the PlayStation Network.”
The real concern comes from the way Sony has dealt with the issue, it took Sony almost a week to notify its users that their had indeed been a theft of information and personal details. The information available to the hackers were highly identifiable and included usernames/passwords/emails addresses/home addresses and even credit card information. The circumstances surrounding Sony got even more controversial when their was strong evidence to suggest that Sony failed to encrypt personal details/held on to older information and made it too easy for external attackers to steal. There are even a number of lawsuits being filed against Sony on behalf of its users, each one addresses Sony’s lack of power to protect private information. Since the initial attack Sony have failed to meet set deadlines and some users have had their personal information openly posted on websites controlled by the hackers.
In response to the outage Sony have released information about what they are calling their “welcome back” program. The idea is to compensate its users with a number of offers including free downloadable content and the use of the Playstation Plus service for 30 days. For many users its not enough, they see Sony’s gross negligence as a betrayal to gamers everywhere. Sony are now saying that it could still be a number of weeks until they are fully back up and running though some services should be restored before then. Many are pointing to May 31st as the day when services are fully restored but as the outage continues there really is not telling when it will be business as usual.
When I first heard about the outage I had serious doubts that it would affect me personally but recently my email account has been compromised. It occurred when my details were stolen and then used to access the account, upon noticing I contacted my email provider and explained what happened. It turns out that my details and password were changed and so I have no chance of recovering the account, a harsh lesson when it comes to using Hotmail . As far as I can tell when the network does come back online I should be able to verify my account through my console, but I'll believe it when i see it.
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