A Long Road comes on an End

This has been a long road for Sony.  As many of you know, the PSN was shut down worldwide in April.  LulzSec took responsibility for the intrusion and the system stayed down for about a month ... for most the world.  Now as of 07/06/2011 the PSN will be coming home.  Japan was not included in the reactivation of the PSN in May as was Europe and the US. The business heads in Japan wanted to be absolutely sure that everything would be secure when they returned access to their country, mostly due to demands placed on them by the government and credit card regulators.  These requirements included preventative measures (even though what that actually meant was not disclosed) to ensure the security of the new Sony PSN system.  They also wanted to know how Sony plans to get their way back into our hearts after having our trust shattered so brutally.

But now the PSN will be back to full strength.  Too bad for Sony though.  Between the breach and the shutdown of the PSN Sony lost an estimated $170 Million dollars.  I have a hard time even imagining that number let alone losing it. One good thing might come from this, until we all turn into lazy bastards again brick and mortar stores might see some additional traffic for people to buy game cards instead of using their Credit Cards on game systems.

PSN - Its On (Mostly) (EDIT)

Kazua Hiraj has announced that Sony has begun a region by region activation of the PSN today.  It is suggested that after you turn on your PS3 and update your firmware you immediately change your password for the PSN (like they have to tell you that).  They are slowly getting to each city and state and are saying it will be "several hours to restore PSN throughout the entire country".  As of this writing at 8:53 PM MST only 7 Northeast states had their service restored and given their estimate, we should be seeing a nation wide return to coverage by Sunday morning.  This is assuming they work on it all night.  If you would like to see the status on the return coverage check on the source link.  Good news is now you can start get Portal 2 on your PC for those that have it on PS3 and Mortal Kombat can start to see the online play it deserves.

EDIT: We now have a full return of the PSN.

PSN Back by 05/31/2011

Sony has been out of the online gaming for almost 3 weeks now, and it will not be back fully for a few weeks more.  They plan to have the system back online in all its (hopefully) unbroken glory by the end of the month.  They plan to slowly bring things back up, including functionality such as home (really?) and chat. No word on the store and Qriocity but we should hear more soon. Most likely we will see a firmware update with the return of the PSN.  Until then you can go ahead and turn your 360 back on and play games on its fully functional network.

PSN Breached

So it has been made officially official that any PII that the PSN may have been keeping for you has been breached.  Ok, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but seeing how it has been down since what, Wednesday of last week, can you blame me?  And now they have come out to say how big the breach actually was.  Sony has engaged a private security firm to examine what they might have been taken in the attack and it was a decent amount of information:

• Name
• Address (City, State and ZIP)
• Country
• Email Address
• Birth Date
• Playstation / Qriocity Login
• Playstation / Qriocity Password
• PSN Handle / Online ID

On top of that profile data such as purchase history, billing address, and security answers could have been taken as well.  And while they have no proof that credit card numbers and expiration dates have been collected they are still advising people to check their credit reports if they kept that information on their PSN account.

So what does this mean for PSN? It is getting a strip down and rebuild.  Sony has decided instead of just patching the hole and risking something of this magnitude happening again that they are going to rebuild the system to have stronger security from the ground up.  Unfortunately this means that we are going to be out of the PSN and Qriocity services a bit longer (read: a long time).