Well the Playstation Network is still down, and it has been one hell of a roller coaster ride since last Thursday, when the outages first began. We went from minor annoyance to the biggest identity theft case in the history of the internet, in a mere few days. The personal information for all PSN users has been compromised, and Sony is working day in, day out, to get the PSN back online and catch the hackers that are responsible. Just yesterday, the internet was hit with a barrage of information regarding the incident. Here is a rundown.

Geohot Didn’t Do It

Though Geohot is certainly still salty from the Sony lawsuit, he made it absolutely no uncertain terms that he was not involved in the PSN security breach in any way shape and form. “I’m not crazy, and would prefer to not have the FBI knocking on my door,” Hotz said on his blog. “Running homebrew and exploring security on your devices is cool, hacking into someone else’s server and stealing databases of user info is not cool … even if it is aimed at douches like Sony.” He then offered some words up to whoever was responsible saying, “You are clearly talented … don’t be a dick and sell people’s information.” Like or hate this guy, at least he isn’t pro-identity theft.

Credit Card Companies Report No Evidence of Fraud

Spokesmen for Wells Fargo and Co., American Express Co., and MasterCard Inc. have all said that they were monitoring cardholder accounts since the PSN security breach and that there has been no unauthorized activity noticed or reported. Sony also says that all credit card data was encrypted and there has been no evidence of hackers gaining access to credit card information as of yet. So we may have dodged a bullet there.

PSN Downtimes Costing Developers and Sony Money

Game studios everywhere are reporting horrible revenues from their Sony products recently. Kotaku reports that there may be a five to ten percent drop in business for Sony after the PSN goes back up. According to the guys at Forbes, Sony could lose up to twenty four billion dollars on this breach. This would make this breach one of the most expensive security breaches in the history of the world. More importantly, many developers are afraid people won’t come back to the PSN after the security breach. Sony will have to provide some incentive to get users to stick with them or else they will see many users fleeing to other consoles.

Canada Now Looking Into PSN Breach

Yesterday we reported that both the US and Britain are looking into the Sony situation to make sure that Sony took all necessary precautions to avoid data theft. Now Canada’s Privacy Commissioner is also investigating the matter. In an official statement the commissioner said, “We will determine next steps once we have a full understanding of the incident.”

The PSN’s First Class-Action Lawsuit is Filed

…and it looks like Sony is going to go right back into courts. A California law firm filed a lawsuit seeking class action status, alleging that Sony did not follow proper industry practices to protect its users information. This is, by the way, exactly what Britain and Canada are investigating, but here in the U.S. we let our courts do the work. The lawsuit is alleging that Sony violated the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard which is basically the standard by which we judge whether or not a credit card payment system is safe for use. If Sony didn’t follow the legal requirements to protect its customer records, it could be in big trouble. The lawsuit also says that Sony failed to appropriately warn their customers that they were at risk of identity theft. Perhaps this will end up costing Sony $24 billion after all.

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Sony Outage Updates — We Aren’t Out of Hot Water Yet
• Sony Network Outage Now a Global Incident
• PSN Outage Changing the World — Updates for May 4th
• The Sony Playstation Network Outage Updates
• The Playstation Network Outage Update — May 02, 2011
• The Sony PSN Update for May 05th — Two Weeks and Counting