Sony Security Woes And Bad Timing

[NateP 1]

For those of you who have not heard, the Sony playstation network was breached by hackers on April 16th 2011. Sony did not recognize this breach right away and 77 million users had their personal information including name, address, phone numbers, and even credit card numbers stolen from Sony servers. Sony did not release this information to its users until a sudden shutdown of playstation network servers nearly a week after the initial security breach. Many of these clients are now scrambling to cancel credit cards and set up identity theft monitoring to protect themselves from the unknown data thieves. Also many clients are outraged that Sony failed to notify them of the security breach until nearly a week after the incident. This comes at a terrible time for Sony as their home country is still dealing with a massive ecological disaster resulting from the recent nuclear power accident. Many of Sony's employees in Japan are currently under an already enormous amount of stress due to the nuclear accident, and now have to deal with the threat of unknown hackers attempting to cripple the company. To make matters worse, on May 2nd 2011, Sony Online Entertainment also suddenly shut down all online operations. A press release from Sony Online Entertainment on May 3rd explains that the attack on the playstation network also opened the door to allow access to the Sony Online Entertainment network. This adds an additional 25 million clients that have had their personal information and credit card info stolen. In total 102 million Sony clients have been affected. On April 30th Sony announced that it expected to resume services on the playstation network by Friday May the 6th, however due to the May 2nd closure of yet another Sony owned and run network, I think that Sony may decide to wait past May 6th to resume services.I myself am one of the 102 million clients that has had my personal information and credit card info stolen. I have reported the issue to my credit card company and they are monitoring my account for suspicious activity. The problem is this, what if the data thieves hold onto the data for an extended period of time and use my personal info down the road a few years to steal my identity or ruin my credit? Sony has lost all credibility as a trustworthy online vendor at least in my eyes. I will worry for years now that someone out there could be destroying my credit or pretending to be me. Sony can't fix that, they can't patch it, its too late.The press release of May 3rd can be found at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ do you think Sony should do about this?

[NateP 1]

It is now May 6th and as I had expected Sony has not yet resumed online services. In fact the problems may be getting worse. Since the SOE network was taken offline on May 2nd, I have been visiting a website hosted by SOE that was providing occasional updates on the situation. The web address is in my previous post.Today I visited this website to see if any progress has been made by Sony and to see if further information has been released. I was surprised to see that now even this website has now been taken down. It has been reported by various sources that the attack on Sony servers was enabled by the fact that Sony was using an outdated version of the Apache web server that has known vulnerabilities. It should be common sense in my mind that this would be the first change needed when updating the security systems of the networks they run. Well I guess that common sense is not at all common because today when visiting the website I just mentioned, the site is not displaying and a 503 Service Unavailable error is displayed. Guess what? The error on this page displays the apache server version. The version displayed is version 2.2.3. For those who are not up on apache versions, the 2.2.3 version was released in July 2006! All I can say is WOW do they have monkeys running the show or what?Oh and by the way, if Sony has such problems hiring competent network admins, I'll gladly take the job! I at least know how to encrypt database entries and update server software!

[NateP 1]

I just found something online today regarding the Sony security breach and I wanted to share it here because in made me laugh so hard I almost fell off my chair. Back in 2009 Sony started putting the slogan "Make Believe" on their logo. Take a look at the attached picture it will make you lol I know it did for me.

Edited May 6, 2011 by NateP (see edit history)