*ren* PSN Down, Customer Info Compromised

[Cheezdoodles]

Its been down for atleast a day now. Something serious seem to have happend, because it sure as hell wasn't planned. (Sony said yesterday that they where having a maintenance, but its quite obvious they are not - as they where unable to give a ETA, and it was unplanned)

ModEdit:

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/26/update-on-playstation-network-and-qriocity/

1. Temporarily turned off PlayStation Network and Qriocity services;
2. Engaged an outside, recognized security firm to conduct a full and complete investigation into what happened; and
3. Quickly taken steps to enhance security and strengthen our network infrastructure by re-building our system to provide you with greater protection of your personal information.

See link for more.

Cheez edit:

we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained.

 

[liolio]

I read something about it yesterday on engadget. The reasons behind the outage are still unknown (but I've really limited access to the web at my job ).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

From PS 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. Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this matter. Please stay tuned to this space for more details, and we’ll update you again as soon as we can.

It coincides with Portal 2 and Steam integration. Could that be the issue?! Other fingers point at Anonymous, although they said they weren't going to target customers any more. Then again Anonymous isn't an organisation but a collection of individuals, and it's possible some people decided to pick on Sony's network.

 

[deathindustrial]

Maybe PSN relies on AWS somewhere in the chain?

Cheers

 

[minimoke]

We probably can't rule out hacking but it's more likely AWS as I recall that Sony was looking into solutions from Akamai and AWS to combat the DoS attacks in the last few weeks.

Whatever the cause I hope it's back up soon as my 5yr old wants to play Warhawk

 

[BadTB25]

It's has been down for ~42 hours now. Sony Europe speculates that it may be a DDOS attack.
http://psx-scene.com/forums/f6/psn-down-still-worldwide-answer-42-a-85343/

Some other sites are having intermittent problems as well (Reddit, Amazon).

 

[RobertR1]

Glad I activated my PC copy of Portal 2 before the outage.

 

[Sinistar]

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. Providing quality entertainment services to our customers and partners is our utmost priority. We are doing all we can to resolve this situation quickly, and we once again thank you for your patience. We will continue to update you promptly as we have additional information to share.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/22/update-on-playstation-network-qriocity-services/

 

[Asher]

Utter shameful and unprofessional on Sony's part. Unacceptable.

You get what you pay for. I hope they reimburse the people who, for whatever reason, pay for PSN.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I just got an email from Cakewalk saying their store had been down the last couple of days because Amazon was out. Seems like a major attack on eCommerce at this point.

 

[JPT]

Latest on the blogs says they got "hacked"

http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2011/04/23/update-on-playstation-network-qriocity-services/

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. Providing quality entertainment services to our customers and partners is our utmost priority. We are doing all we can to resolve this situation quickly, and we once again thank you for your patience. We will continue to update you promptly as we have additional information to share.

And if its related to Amazon cloud, I guess,Amazon will lose customers now.

I hope that somebody with the inside info, will do a writeup about this attack on cloud based services. And if it was intentional to do it in sync with the Skynet dates.

 

[-tkf-]

This is the AMAZON EC2 affected customers, i see sony there but i think PSN is hosted somewhere else?

http://www.ec2disabled.com/

And most of those sites are back up, and afaik the Amazon failure had nothing todo with hacking but was related to a internal program that caused the servers to backup themselve up to such an extent they ran out of diskspace. One of the most annoying problems in any server is corrupt file systems, no amount of UPS or Raid can help with that.

http://twitter.com/#!/Mathieulh is full of harsh words on the PSN security, funny how getting access to the PS3 inner working really opened up a can of worms on Sony because they were slacking on security?

 

[Gradthrawn]

Utter shameful and unprofessional on Sony's part. Unacceptable.

You get what you pay for. I hope they reimburse the people who, for whatever reason, pay for PSN.

$50 / 12 months = $4.16
$4.16 / 30 days = $0.14
$0.14 x 5 days = $0.69



EDIT

$0.69 x 100k customers = $69,444.

 

[AzBat]

$50 / 12 months = $4.16
$4.16 / 30 days = $0.14
$0.14 x 5 days = $0.69



EDIT

$0.69 x 100k customers = $69,444.

100k customers? I thought they had 69 million user accounts?

$0.69 x 69 million members = $47.61 million, wow. Whatever the number is it is costing them serious money. I'm sure Sony will reimburse their customers somehow. Would be suicidal not to.

Anybody really think it's an external intruder? Doesn't look like a DDoS attack to me. Though it might be a hacker(s) that breached the network & they had to shut it down so they could keep it from happening again. Just not real sold on that idea. Could understand a couple of hours, but not a couple of days. Sounds like more incompetence.

Tommy McClain

 

[DJ12]

Gradthrawn was referring to those that have paid for PSN+, not the vast majority that pay nothing for the service as you are "working" with in your post.

 

[Arwin]

Though it might be a hacker(s) that breached the network & they had to shut it down so they could keep it from happening again. Could understand a couple of hours, but not a couple of days.

Yeah, patching a security hole is always just a matter of minutes normally, I don't understand how they can take this long.

 

[BRiT]

Sony can't understand how the hackers keep guessing their system passwords that they generated randomly once...

 

[AzBat]

Gradthrawn was referring to those that have paid for PSN+, not the vast majority that pay nothing for the service as you are "working" with in your post.

Gotcha. But don't those who have the free accounts still not entitled to some kind reimbursement since some of the games they purchased can't work without PSN access?

Tommy McClain

 

[RobertR1]

Gotcha. But don't those who have the free accounts still not entitled to some kind reimbursement since some of the games they purchased can't work without PSN access?

Tommy McClain

From a comsumer perspective, PSN is a major draw of the PS3. It's a big selling point and 3 highly anticipated games released just this week have a strong emphasis on their MP portion. In that sense, you're crippling a major draw for these and other existing games.

Ultimately, it would be nice if Sony had an Amazon like attitude to this outage. Amazon has been very proactive with updates and status whereas Sony's seem to be "we'll let you know..." attitude.

 

[AzBat]

Yeah, patching a security hole is always just a matter of minutes normally, I don't understand how they can take this long.

We're not entirely sure it's a security hole anyway though it's probable. However, it could be the same thing that happened with Amazon. One would have thought they would be able to fix this in no more than 1 days time. I think you're giving PS3 hackers too much credit to pull something like this off. A lot of the hackers still haven't agreed on why it's down. Though I'm sure Sony would love to blame them for it.

Tommy McClain