The Sony PSN Update for May 05th — Two Weeks and Counting
New York Subpoenas Sony Over PSN Breach
According to Bloomberg the New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently subpoenaed Sony as part of a consumer protection inquiry. He is seeking information on what Sony told PSN subscribers and when. If a safety guarantee was made, of any sort, or if consumers were not adequately aware of the possible threat that storing their info on Sony’s databases entailed, then the Federal Trade Commission might have to get involved. It apparently counts as false advertising if a server is marketed as safe and then later hacked.
Sony Still Plans to Have PSN Up This Week
Last Sunday, Sony told us on their blog that the PSN would be up and running sometime this week. Well, it’s been two weeks now, and the PSN is still down. The week is quickly running out, with only three days left to see service return. Not to worry, because Sony has once again reaffirmed to Kotaku that PSN services will come back this week. We can only hope.
Criminals Suffering from PSN Breach
Believe it or not, the criminal identity theft trade is actually suffering from the PSN breach. According to an article from The New York Times credit card or personal info can normally be sold for five to ten dollars online. However, if the information of all those millions of PSN users hits the market, Economics 101 kicks in and the market becomes flooded, dropping the price to around a dollar or less. In fact, the very idea that this info could, at some point, hit the market may already be reducing info theft sale prices. Capitalism’s a bitch.
Anonymous Continues to Claim Non-Involvement
Anonymous continues to say they had nothing to do with the PSN hack, even after Sony found a file named Anonymous with the words “we are legion” inside it. At this point, even mentioning Sony in Anonymous’s IRC channels could get you banned. Members of Anonymous are crying “scapegoat” saying that Sony is just looking for a way to make them look bad, and if that is the case Sony has certainly succeeded. Attacking the PSN and keeping millions of gamers out of their online games for weeks doesn’t pain Anonymous as the savior of the internet masses. On the other hand, hacking a gigantic company, making it seem like millions of people had their personal information stolen, and then not making that personal info available to anyone to screw over both Sony and identity thieves (see our previous news story) totally falls in line with Anonymous’s MO.
Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Believes It’s Time for Corporate Fines
Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, recently talked with The Vancouver Sun about the PSN breach. This is what she had to say. “I am deeply troubled by the large number of major breaches we are seeing, including serious incidents in recent weeks that have affected hundreds of thousands of Canadians. It seems to me that it’s time to begin imposing fines — significant, attention-getting fines — on companies when poor privacy and security practices lead to breaches.” A recent bill proposed to the Canadian government would require companies to report to a governmental body every time there is evidence of a server intrusion.
Sony Knew We Were at Risk for Six Days
Kotaku recently combed through Sony’s response to congress and reduced it to a simple timeline of PSN related events. Most importantly, the timeline shows April 20th as the day that Sony first detected an intrusion to their servers, including evidence that data had been removed from the servers in some fashion. The date that consumers were informed of this? April 26th.
Parts of the PSN Didn’t Have Firewall Protection
A recent article by industrygamers revealed that key parts of the PSN ran on Apache servers that “were unpatched and had no firewall installed.” What!?!
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