SOE - No Breaks for You

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Man, Sony cannot seem to catch a break.  Sure you know that the PSN was broken into user information was stolen.  Sure you know that you may have lost your credit card that was used to buy games on the PSN to hackers.  But did you know that the same thing happened to all of the Sony Online Entertainment services?  This includes games such as Everquest 2, Free Realms, DC Online, and Clone Wars Adventures.  They found out May 2 (in Tokyo time) that the information was stolen around April 16th while doing a security audit in response to the PSN outage. And if you are out of the country things can be worse.  In addition to:

  • name
  • address
  • e-mail address
  • birthdate
  • gender
  • phone number
  • login name
  • hashed password

10,700 users in Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Spain may have had their dreict debt accounts breached.  This would give the hacker access to:

  • bank account number
  • customer name
  • account name
  • customer address

Not a good week for Sony.  So now SOE is down in addition to PSN (which should be up later this week) is down.  Sony is working on a "make good" plan for its users and at a local level will work with their users to get them in identify theft programs.  Hit the link for the full press release and check then check with your bank to make sure you don't have any unwanted charges on your accounts.

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PSN Breached

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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).