Sony Blames 'External Intrusion' For Lengthy PSN Outage

Several readers have noted that outages on Sony's PlayStation Network have prevented online play for the past few days. The company has now blamed an 'external intrusion' for the trouble, saying they took down the network to "conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward." Some suspect an attack by Anonymous, who declared war on Sony earlier this month, but Anonymous has disavowed knowledge of such an attack. Meanwhile, others are asking whether Sony should compensate users for the inability to play PS3 multiplayer modes, and even single-player modes on a few downloadable games.

Comments

Wow

[headhot]

PSN has been down since Tuesday night, blowing the launches of Portal 2 (plus steam) and Mortal Kombat 30. The system is not still down for forensic or investigational issues, its down because they haven't figured out how to bring it back up. They are losing too much money and credibility having it down so long. My guess is they are poring though back up tapes right now. Some one owned them good.

Also, this didn't feel like a DDOS, with intermittent problem. PSN seems to have gone down hard. When Sony says "infiltrated," I think totally raped their systems.

Re:Wow

[powerlord]

If someone got root on Sony's update servers, you'd better believe those are staying offline.

Then feel secure that those aren't the problem.

I was playing a Demo recently and it informed me there was an update available. System downloaded the update and loaded it, even though PSN is still down and I still can't log in.

I heard a rumor that they found people circumventing the checkout/purchase system in some way. If that is true, then they may be keeping the system down while they fix that.

Two more plausible explanations:

1) someone used the fact that PS3s internal key has been exposed to try to craft code to go after the Login/Pay servers through the PS3 directly, on the idea that Sony programmed those interfaces on the assumption that they are secure, and only produced well formed code, leaving a chink in the armor. If that IS the case, then Sony may have shut down the whole system rather than letting it sit open and exposed once they detected the intrusion, in an effort to head off data theft (while they rewrite the interface?).

2) someone could have been performing a Denial of Service attack, again through internal PS3 calls which were expected to be well formed.

Best three days I've had with my son

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been the best time that my 15 year old son and I have had since the PlayStation arrived in December. With the network dead, we went bicycling and bowling (his top score was 134); he showed me how to solve the last layer (well the OLL) of the Rubik's Cube.

I deeply thank whoever did this, and I wish you only the best!
  -CS in Berkeley

Re:Anonymous represents something new

[Dachannien]

A new kind of organization. I would say Anonymous is a cyber intelligence organization, not just a collection of jerks.

There are a few people associating themselves with Anonymous who have the expertise to become a "cyber intelligence organization", and a few thousand who are jerks. The question is whether those few people have the resources to make it happen, and nobody can really be certain until they manage to pull off a coup of some sort (HBGary is chump change compared to what I'm talking about) without being busted by the FBI, Interpol, etc.

But in the long term Anonymous is growing stronger at an exponential rate. Their only flaw at this moment in time is their relative inexperience and their silly tactics at times. They go from brilliant tactics at some points in time (such as hacking the email server at HBGaryFederal), to really dumb tactics like DDOSing Sony and taking down webpages.

This actually proves my point. The masses didn't do the HBGary hack. That was one or a few people who actually know what they're doing. The only reason Anonymous gets the credit is because the people responsible allowed the credit to go that way. The Sony, Amazon, and MasterCard DDoS attacks were performed by the masses, and they've all created varying levels of embarrassment for Anonymous due to their lack of success or the pointlessness of their targets.