It has been over a month since Sony announced that the reason for the shutdown of their PlayStation Network service on April 20, 2011 was due to an external intrusion. On May 4, 2011 Sony had confirmed that the PSN Attack was able to obtain the personal information from over 100 million users. Following the hack, Sony remained confident and projected a short downtime for the network. Although Sony initially stated that they would fully restore their services by the end of the week, the recovery process experienced unforeseen problems.
from http://us.playstation.com/psn/, June 2011
After being disabled for approximately 23 days, on May 15, 2011 the Sony PlayStation Network began restoring parts of their service country by country. At this time the sign-in for the PSN/Qriocity services, online gameplay, rental content, third party services, friends list, and chat functionality were all restored. Missing from the services that were brought back online was the PlayStation Store. Once back online the network again faced an issue concerning the password reset page. It was discovered that the password reset process was enabling unauthorized users to change the passwords of other users provided that they had knowledge of their email address and date of birth. After the discovery of this exploit the network disabled the password reset pages and resumed working to restore the PlayStation Store.
Sony announced that they will be offering customers free content as a part of a “Welcome Back Program”. The free customer appreciation content will be available sometime shortly after full restoration. Sony has also stated that the cost of the network outages and restoration was $171 million which includes the costs of security enhancements, customer reimbursements, and loss of content sales.
Yesterday afternoon (June 1, 2011) the PlayStation Network posted on the PSN Blog that that the PlayStation Store was once again up and running. The PS Store is now offering new updates, downloadable games, demos, add-ons, themes, avatars, and videos. For now, Sony is still in the testing process for the welcome back program download and expects it to be available for users shortly. Another PSN update is currently scheduled for Friday June 3, 2011.
Sony executives have stated “no system is 100 percent secure”, having learned from this occurrence Sony has made several security improvements and created a new Chief Information Security Officer position. The PlayStation Network is not the only Sony service to suffer intrusion, in a separate incident Sony Ericsson was also hit. The Sony Ericsson Hack was said to have affected over 2,000 customers. According to The Huffington Post the servers at SonyPictures.com were also attacked on Thursday June 1, 2011. This hack obtain the the information of 1 million users which was later posted on a website by hacker group LulzSecurity. Other recent security breaches include the Lockheed Martin Cyber Attack, Google Gmail hack and the PBS hack, these hacks present a clear picture of how technology can be used to do harm and provide an even greater reason for companies to implement as many proactive security measures as possible.
Although Sony projected an $860 million profit in a February report the company is now projecting a $3.2 billion net loss for the year. The loss is a combined result of several network hacks, security upgrades, customer remuneration, tax credit write offs from the previous quarter, and disruption in production caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
Taking into consideration the hard times faced by Sony recently, will you continue to be a customer or have you lost all faith in them? Share your thoughts below.
Thanks for Reading and Have a Great Day!
Dustin
