George Hotz–the PS3-jailbreaking hacker whose Sony-instigated legal woes probably had something to do with the PlayStation Network security attack–has blogged about the breach. He’s not happy with it, isn’t sympathetic to Sony’s plight, and (like me) wonders how it was done.
Tag Archives | Sony
Okay, Sony, Time to Say “Sorry” for the PSN Breach
Maybe I’m just over-sensitive, but it strikes as odd — and maybe a little arrogant — that Sony hasn’t apologized for the Playstation Network breach that resulted in stolen passwords and personal information.
I’ve read all seven of Sony’s updates on the official Playstation Blog, and not a single “sorry” or “apologize” is uttered throughout. The most Sony can muster is this: “We sincerely regret any inconvenience or concern this outage has caused, and rest assured that we’re going to get the services back online as quickly as we can.”
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Don’t Panic About Security Leaks. Do Defend Yourself.
My new TIME.com Technologizer column is on the PlayStation Network and Epsilon leaks, and a few things we consumers can do to help defend ourselves from anything too nasty happening as a result of this kind of stuff.
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Playstation Network Breach: It’s Really, Really Bad
Sony’s Playstation Network outage has gone from one of the worst Internet service interruptions ever to one of the worst security failures in consumer electronics history.
If you’re one of the 70 million members of the Playstation Network or Qriocity services, all of your personal and login information is compromised. Everything. That includes your name, address, e-mail address, birthday, user name and password. Your profile data, purchase history and password security answers may be compromised as well.
Sony says there’s no evidence that credit card information was taken, but it “cannot rule out the possibility.” Sony’s encouraging PSN users to keep a close watch on their credit card statements, and has provided information for users who want to set up fraud alerts. You can find those details at the official Playstation Blog.
As for when PSN will be back up, Sony says it has “a clear path” to bring systems back online, and hopes to restore “some services within a week.” However, Sony now has much bigger problems, having let a wealth of personal information, and possibly financial information, fall into the wrong hands.
All users will be getting a notification from Sony via e-mail, advising them to change their passwords for PSN (once it’s back online) and any other service for which the same password is used. Users are also warned to watch out for e-mail, postal and telephone scams. Understatement of the year goes to this sentence in Sony’s letter: “We thank you for your patience as we complete our investigation of this incident, and we regret any inconvenience.”
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Even Once the PlayStation Network is Back, This Thing is Far From Over
[UPDATE: The news got way worse after I wrote this.]
I’m not a PlayStation Network member, or much of a gamer at all. But I’m kind of fascinated by Internet outages–and the one currently affecting Sony’s PlayStation Network and Qriocity service is one for the record books. In fact, it may be the worst one of all time, if you multiply the number of people impacted by the hours of the outage. And it continues on, with no evidence that it’s going to end soon. (Sony, which blithely said it might last for a day or two at first, is no longer making any predictions.)
[UPDATE: Some commenters have rightly reminded me of the two-week Xbox Live outage back in 2008–a less interesting, but lengthier (so far!) service interruption.)
A very basic timeline of events to date:
- In January, Sony sued jailbreaking guru George Hotz and others over a PlayStation jailbreak that permitted the installation of unapproved apps.
- On April 4th, the online shadow army known as “Anonymous,” upset over Sony’s lawsuit against PlayStation hacker George Hotz, managed to use denial-of-service attracks to take down PlayStation.com.
- On April 11th, Sony settled with Hotz.
- On Wednesday of last week, Sony’s PlayStation Blog said that the company was aware “certain functions” of the PlayStation Network were down.
- On Thursday, it said that it might be “a full day or two” before things got back to normal.
- On Friday, it said that an “external intrusion” had impacted PSN and Qriocity services, and that it had shut them off until it could ensure “smooth and secure” operation.
- Also on Friday, Anonymous denied that it had caused the outage.
- On Saturday, it said that it was undertaking a “time-consuming” rebuilding of its network infrastructure.
- On Monday, it said that it was working to restore the services “quickly,” but had no information about how long it would be until they returned.
- Today’s Tuesday, so if the outage persists for another day, it’ll have gone on for a week. I can’t think of any major Internet service that’s been toast for so long.
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Sony’s Android Tablets: One’s a Wedge, One Folds Up
When you jump into the teeming Android tablet business, you choose to use an operating system that’s also used by a bunch of manufacturers. And there’s only so much you can do to differentiate the hardware–almost every tablet is basically a skinny slab with a great big touchscreen.
Sony, however, just announced two Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablets with hardware that’s not the same ol’ same ol’. They’re not shipping until this fall, and are known at the moment only by the codenames S1 and S2.
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Playstation Network Still Down as Sony Rebuilds
The Playstation Network outage that began last Wednesday has continued through the weekend, as Sony rebuilds the network in the wake of a security breach.
Sony is no longer estimating when PSN will be back online. On Thursday, the company only expected the outage to last a day or two.
Sony confirmed on Friday that the network was hacked, or in spokesman Patrick Seybold’s words, affected by an “external intrusion.” This caused Sony to shut down PSN entirely, along with the Qriocity service. Now, Seybold says the company is working around the clock to restore access.
“Our efforts to resolve this matter involve re-building our system to further strengthen our network infrastructure,” Seybold wrote on the official Playstation Blog. “Though this task is time-consuming, we decided it was worth the time necessary to provide the system with additional security.”
Hacking group Anonymous claims that it wasn’t involved in the attack, but didn’t rule out the possibility that individual members acted alone. The group, which has a vendetta against Sony for suing PS3 hacker George Hotz, has previously attacked Sony websites.
The big unanswered question now, aside from when PSN will be back up, is whether any user information or credit card numbers were exposed during the breach. Answering that question, I’d argue, should be the top priority.
[UPDATE: An unnamed Sony source told Playstation Universe that PSN’s Japanese servers may be restored on Monday, and that U.S. and Europe servers would follow on Tuesday. So far, this information is unconfirmed.]
[UPDATE 2: Sony told PC World that it doesn’t yet know whether credit card numbers were stolen.]
[UPDATE 3: Sony now says all users’ personal information was compromised, and credit cards may have been compromised as well. More details here.]
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Sony Disables PlayStation Network After Security Breach
Sites and services go down all the time. Just ask Amazon. And all their customers. But they weren’t the only ones to suffer a massive outage this week, as Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) has been offline for several days now. After a long period of silence, Sony has finally provided some situational insight:
An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services. In order to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward, we turned off PlayStation Network & Qriocity services on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th.
Of course what they’re saying is that they’ve been hacked. And until Sony figures out what’s going on and how to stop it, they’ve pulled the network plug. So the forensics team has probably been doing their thing, maybe law enforcement too, as the engineers bolster PlayStation Network defenses.
Unfortunately, Sony hasn’t provided an ETA for PSN service restoration. And I know several of my work buddies with PS3s are suffering from Call of Duty, Black Ops withdrawal. But I’m not sure they appreciated my repeated mocking suggestions to join me on the superior Xbox Live.
(This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.)
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The PSP Lives On For Yankees
That story about the PSP Go being discontinued? It’s true for Asia and Europe, but production will continue in North America.
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Playstation Network is Down for a Day or Two
Sony’s Playstation Network is down, and it may not come back up for a couple of days, according to the official Playstation Blog.
“While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running,” Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold wrote.
Europe’s Playstation blog previously said the company was investigating “the possibility of targeted behavior by an outside party,” but that message has since been removed. Hacking group Anonymous, which attacked Sony’s servers earlier this month, claims no involvement.
Talk about terrible timing. This week saw the launch of Mortal Kombat, Portal 2 and SOCOM 4, all of which have an online component. SOCOM 4 is a Playstation 3 exclusive geared mainly towards online play, and includes big incentives to buy the game new. In addition to disabling online play, the PSN outage affects the Qriocity music service, Netflix, MLB.tv and any other service requiring a PSN login.
Still, this isn’t quite as severe as the PSN problems that occurred in March 2010, when a leap year issue caused some users to lose data just by turning on their consoles. Sony didn’t relay that message to its customers until 16 hours after the first reports emerged.
[UPDATE: Sony says that the outage–still ongoing–is due to it taking down the network after a security breach.]
[UPDATE 2: Still no end in sight. Sony now says it’s rebuilding the network for added security.]
[UPDATE 3: Sony now says all users’ personal information was compromised, and credit cards may have been compromised as well. More details here.]