PSN is offline (so is this thread)

[Mr. Spencer]

Just let Sony do their job instead of harrassing them over it. Shit hit the fan, let someone clean it.

[Kaneco]

Well, I don't mind how long it takes...it's not to die for as I said earlier.

I've noticed, even more now, that there are other games, whether they're in another
platform or/and whether they may be played online or offline, that I can finally get
back on or/and many other things that are not gaming related...it's also mostly because
of the fact that I'm done with the current college semester.

I'm keeping a close eye on my bank statement which is the only thing I care about at
the moment.

I'm not going to blame Sony for what just happened but I'm not going to defend them
either because lately they've become jerks towards innocent bystanders that just
wanted to make the most out of their consoles and share the knowledge with the world
with no ill intentions, not to mention that they're also consumers (I feel for the hacker
Graf mostly. Poor Guy)...I'm sorry but they had it coming and hopefully it teaches them
to be more humble.

Here's hoping that everything will get back to normal in due time.

[Zombie Fred]

Just let Sony do their job instead of harrassing them over it. Shit hit the fan, let someone clean it.

I have to agree, Identidy theft is going to be a bitch to clean up

[Mr. Spencer]

Thing is, I don't think whoever hacked it did so with the intent of stealing personal information. It was an unintended side effect of breaking in. What they wanted to do was bring down the PlayStation Network and harm Sony, and that's exactly what they've done. As for personal details and all that, I don't know what those responsible will do it. It could end up in a multi-part RAR file on Pirate Bay for lulz, but more likely nothing will happen.

The hackers achieved their objective and identity theft was not one of them. However, the problem arises when that information ends up in the hands of people who DO want to use it maliciously. Like Sony have advised, the best thing to do is keep a close eye on bank statements and if there's any suspicious activity then cancel your card. Changing passwords doesn't take a long time and can be done in a matter of minutes, so if you're concerned then you know what you need to do.

As a whole, I think Sony have been very open with us. There's good reasons why they couldn't reveal information without knowing the full picture. There's an in-depth FAQ available here - http://faq.en.playstation.com/cgi-bi...B&p_faqid=5593

What we're seeing is a typical kneejerk reaction, albeit a somewhat understandable one. But it's not something to overreact about. Change passwords, monitor your bank statements and let Sony deal with the problem. The consumer is the most important part of any business and Sony will do everything in their power to resolve this issue and track down those responsible to account for their actions. Essentially this is an act of borderline cyber-terrorism and you can sure that Sony and the relevant authorities will throw everything they have at the hacker(s) responsible.

I'm no proponent of corporate greed but I do have issue with a bunch of kids who felt butthurt about Sony's legal action towards one of their own. It's a childish response and what they've done is flip the Monopoly board.

Spoiler:

show spoiler

Sounds like I should work for Sony.

[Stu]

Fuck Sony. I went to the inconvenience last week of trying to find somewhere i could buy a PSN voucher with an Entropay card to buy Dino Crisis 2. When i finally did, the servers were down. It's a massive inconvenience and life has been one disaster after another ever since.

*shakes fist*

[Mr. Spencer]

Sony still have much to sort out but they've come a long way since the disaster that was the PS3 launch. The fact that they were arrogant regarding the PS2's success is old news but times change and so do companies, look at EA for a shining example of this. Sony aren't the only business in the games industry that are fucking up, Microsoft have pulled stupid shit in the past but like I said, things change.

The rebranding of the PS3 and the release of the slim model was something that went without a hitch, plus the Move controller worked straight off the bat without any significant technical issue or fault. The same couldn't be said for Kinect. Yeah, I understand full well that right now you're going to perceive me as some deluded Sony fanboy but that isn't the case. I'm simply exercising some rational thought to counteract all this retarded anti-Sony hatred that's been banded around for the past four years.

Sony have had their fair share of fuckeries, but it would be bias to discuss those without giving mention to those made by their competitors.

[Zombie Fred]

Jesus Spencer, I didn't know how apologetic you are with this Sony business. The things I just find mind blowing is how rubbish their security measures were to allow such a thing to get their servers infiltrated in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised however considering how the culture is like with their infrastructure in japan compared to what it is like over here in Europe/America. The only thing positive about this is how this will be a big wake up call to other big companies to review their security on their network protocols and security services on the servers so nothing like this happens again. It's almost as worst as how the previous goverment accidently lost a fair portion of our population's personal data out on public transport, being too careless and not taking the right measures. I am just going to wait to see what will happen with the data that was obtained. You can never be sure with everything these days.

[Mr. Spencer]

Fred, the problem arose when Sony decided to provoke the hacker community with legal action against one of their own. To make matters worse they didn't have the adequete defence with which to protect themselves against reprisals, and what we're seeing right now is the product of that negligence. I don't like to look at it as an excuse to bitch but rather an opportunity, one for Sony to wake up, gain some humility and correct a mistake.

Carelessness is the enemy, arrogance defeats us.

[Stu]

Some perspective here...

Sony suspect that the initial intrusion may have taken place up to TWELVE days ago.

I only received an email notifying me(to my American account no less, not even my primary account) THIS MORNING.

Think of the more casual gamers that wouldn't have seen any of this in the news? That's TWELVE DAYS where people's bank details might have been compromised.

No ammount of apologies or justification will be able to put that right for a lot of people.

Fred, the problem arose when Sony decided to provoke the hacker community with legal action against one of their own.

Pure speculation.

[Zombie Fred]

It was getting their attention from the hacker community when they started to remove Linux from their updated OFW which caused this in the first place. Sony's ignorance was their own failing when they underestimated what would happen and not taking the right measures and their own security revisions before this happened, and not telling people beforehand in more than a week that has pass. The biggest thing that sucks is the game developers who released their content on the PSN and suffering a big lost out of this because of losing consumer confidence due to this affair. It’s half their fault and the other half to the hackers for causing this. It’s a vicious cycle because you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t (ala catch 22) if you’re going to force a closed platform to the millions of people who own the hardware.

Here's Geots's thoughts about this, he has gave his opinion on this.

To start, I sure am glad I don't have a PSN account about now. And, as a onetime victim of identity theft, I feel for everyone who's data has been stolen. I'm not going to make cracks at Sony for flipping a shit when /their/ data is compromised, and not even having the decency to apologize when it's your data that's misappropriated.
And to anyone who thinks I was involved in any way with this, I'm not crazy, and would prefer to not have the FBI knocking on my door. Running homebrew and exploring security on your devices is cool, hacking into someone elses server and stealing databases of user info is not cool. You make the hacking community look bad, even if it is aimed at douches like Sony.

Also, let's not fault the Sony engineers for this, the same way I do not fault the engineers who designed the BMG rootkit. The fault lies with the executives who declared a war on hackers, laughed at the idea of people penetrating the fortress that once was Sony, whined incessantly about piracy, and kept hiring more lawyers when they really needed to hire good security experts. Alienating the hacker community is not a good idea.
To the perpetrator, two things. You are clearly talented and will have plenty of money(or a jail sentence and bankruptcy) coming to you in the future. Don't be a dick and sell people's information. And I'd love to see a write up on how it all went down...lord knows we'll never get that from Sony, noobs probably had the password set to '4' or something. I mean, at least it was randomly generated.

[Alexia_Ashford]

A lot of this thread seems "pure speculation".. I don't see what Kinect or Move working when they first came out has anything to do with what has happened right now. I don't remember all of the customers from XBL being the victim of identity theft either.

Spencer, what evidence do you have what the motives were of the hacker who infiltrated PSN, that identity theft wasn't their objective, etc? Like Stu said, by the time I've found out that my debit card details could have been stolen, some freeloader could have booked himself a week in London in a 5 star hotel.

I read a very good quote which I'd like to repeat here with the "It's not Sony's fault" point - I do business with Sony, not the hackers. I expect Sony to have the security in place to keep my personal details secure. If they cannot, I will stop doing business with them. No fuckeries from any other party, I believe, is comparible to placing 70 million odd people at direct risk of identity fraud/theft.

I guess I'm lucky that I changed the password for my PSN e-mail address about 2 weeks ago. It seems like some people are trying to find any good thing they've ever done to defend Sony against this with. It's a massive cock up, and one they should, and will pay for. Some estimates place it at £150 million in the UK alone and billions worldwide. I believe it will spell disaster for the PS3 as it has pissed off many of its users worldwide. And I would say exactly the same thing had it been Microsoft or Nintendo who had done this.

Edit: Oh, great. Just found out my other e-mail address which is linked to PayPal, eBay, my bank and everything important is also on PSN. Awesome.

[TheSelfishGene]

The damage this has done to their brand is absolutely massive.
My personal situation is that I have a few PSN accounts, a Japanese and US one to use their prepaid cards on, as well as a local one. As far as I can recall I haven't used my credit card to make a purchase on the local account.
At this point I have absolutely no intentions of doing and financial transactions with Sony over the PSN in the future. A free game or whatever people are suggesting they should provide to compensate would do nothing to allay my fears of this happening again. Hopefully they rightly compensate people who paid for services they have reneged on providing (PSN+ and Qriosity), and I suspect they will give people something as a gesture of good will. But at this point for me, they need to prove that a MASSIVE fuck up like this just can't happen again. Then I may consider dealing with them in the future.

[Mr. Spencer]

Think of the more casual gamers that wouldn't have seen any of this in the news? That's TWELVE DAYS where people's bank details might have been compromised..

Except Sony shut down the entire network on the day the intrusion occurred, as to stop that thing from happening. You're assuming that the hackers had access to the information for a full twelve days, which is not the case.

Spencer, what evidence do you have what the motives were of the hacker who infiltrated PSN, that identity theft wasn't their objective, etc?

Because in all likelihood it was an attack from a splinter group or individual within Anonymous, and their objective from the get-go has been to target Sony, not the consumers. The timeframe between when Anonymous ceased their attacks and when this happened is too brief for the two to be unrelated. Like I said, Anonymous were not involved but certain individuals from the groupmost likely were. Exposing this security flaw has done them more good than obtaining any user information, but again, this information could end up on Pirate Bay (for the lulz) where it would likely end up in the hands of someone who does want to use that information maliciously. Yes it's speculation, but founded on logic.

Also, I'm done disputing this. I've got a lot of shit that needs doing and to be fair I shouldn't even be on here! Hahaha.

Am I disappointed with Sony? Yes, of course I am. Who wouldn't be? They failed to have the necessary security precautions in place. But where others see blame and anger, I see opportunity and change. Fuck-ups are the best way to improve upon oneself and hopefully Sony will come away from this with a lot learnt. Sometimes you've got to get a bloody nose once in a while if you want to better yourself and learn where you went wrong.

[Zombie Fred]

It doesn't help when these below will begin investigation;

legal problems seem to be just the tip of the iceberg for Sony. In addition to the obvious trust issues Sony will face with customers, the company is also encountering mounting regulatory problems resulting from the security breach. Members of Congress are already getting involved: Mary Bono Mack of California, chair of the House Subcommittee for Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, has opened an investigation on the matter.

Representative Bobby Rush of Illinois and Senator Tom Carper of Delaware have both gone a step further and begun pushing for more serious cyber-security legislation. In a letter to Sony CEO Howard Stringer, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut stated, “I am concerned that PlayStation Network users’ personal and financial information may have been inappropriately accessed by a third party. Compounding this concern is the troubling lack of notification from Sony about the nature of the data breach.”

But the US government isn’t the only one getting into the act: Regulatory agencies from around the world have opened investigations into the PSN intrusion. Britain’s Information Commissioner’s office and Canada’s Privacy Commissioner have both opened investigations to see if Sony violated the law by not better protecting user’s personal information.

You can't spin this kind of damage control, no chance.

[Darkmoon]

I'm really not that angry that it happened. In this day and age, where even the British Militry can loose there satalites to hackers as I believe happened a few years ago, I honestly don't think it's possible to simply place the blame of being hacked on a company. So long as they took reasonable precatuions, and at least tried to keep up to date, I can't really fault them if the system had a flaw that could be exploited.

Let's face it - how many times have we all heard the stories of a fuckup in Windows leaving us and our bank accounts vulnerable? Some little coding error that means a hacker can grab your details with a key logger or the like? Yes, in that they can only grab one or two cards per person, rather than the millions stolen potentially from Sony, but I haven't seen people screaming for Mircosoft's head because there protection wasn't absoloutely perfect. There's always gonna be a way in, to any system.

What I am still pissed off about is how Sony have acted since. They may have waited 12 days to tell people about this? 12 days? That's getting beyond ridiculous. Some poor sod could have had a nasty shock when he found his rent or morgatge payment didn't make it out because someone cleaned out his account and he wasn't told by Sony until afterwards. It's just wrong to leave people dangling like that, and while I'm guessing Sony was waiting to protect there reputation it's backfired royally.