77 Million Accounts Stolen From Playstation Network

Runaway1956 was one of many users to continue to update us about the intrusion we've been following this week. "Sony is warning its millions of PlayStation Network users to watch out for identity-theft scams after hackers breached its security and plundered the user names, passwords, addresses, birth dates, and other information used to register accounts. Sony's stunning admission came six days after the PlayStation Network was taken down following what the company described as an 'external intrusion'. The stolen information may also include payment-card data, purchase history, billing addresses, and security answers used to change passwords, Sony said on Tuesday. The company plans to keep the hacked system offline for the time being, and to restore services gradually. The advisory also applies to users of Sony's related Qriocity network."

Comments

Unencrypted = Stupid

[Bloodwine77]

It amazes me that a company as large and established as Sony would make such a boneheaded move as storing sensitive information in plaintext. Passwords and answers to secret questions should always be hashed. Credit card information and other sensitive information should be encrypted (preferably AES-256 or stronger).

Re:Unencrypted = Stupid

[rsmith-mac]

To give Sony all the credit they deserve (however little it is), the sensitive records like passwords probably weren't stored in plaintext.

It's standard operating procedure at most companies to treat any data breaches as if the data was plaintext and will be immediately exploited. Once the hackers have taken the data, you have no way to tell if they have a way to decrypt/reverse it or not, so you simply assume they do.

At the same time.almost no one feels like explaining to users what password hashes are and why their data is probably safe, so the public announcements always reflect the assumption above and present the worst case scenario to users, and maybe encryption is mentioned somewhere. Whether the data was decrypted or not, if you say it was then you've covered your ass. It's not as if most laypeople believe that the encryption will hold anyhow.

In short, Sony's pretty damned stupid, but whether anything was encrypted or not they're going to treat it as if it wasn't, and their warnings are going to reflect that. Just because they aren't talking about it being encrypted doesn't mean it was stored in plaintext. The resolution is the same either way: assume the bad guys have it in plaintext form, and watch your credit reports.

Re:Unencrypted = Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I trust Congress to make laws that will cause secure implementations to be made.

Remember, these are the guys who can't make a tax code that requires companies to actually pay _any_ tax on billions of dollars' of income.

Credit card numbers WERE taken too

[Anonymous Coward]

I posted this in the last thread, but PSN users are already seeing their credit cards being fraudulently used!

So if you're affected, CANCEL YOUR CARD!

It's not a possibility anymore, it's a certainty.

Re:Credit card numbers WERE taken too

[RobDude]

That seems a little extreme.

You aren't liable for fraudulent charges. And until Sony sends you a certified letter stating that your credit card was compromised you don't know that your card was. I'll just wait until I see a fraudulent charge, then make a 10 minute phone call and have a new card/number mailed out to me. The biggest pain is updating the reoccurring bills/payments.

Even if they had access to your credit card number you don't know what they are going to do with it. Sell it? Maybe. Or maybe they are just using this to piss off Sony. And, according to Sony, they only have the credit card #s - not the CVV or CV2 code. So, it would be reasonably difficult to make a purchase.

I'll alert Capital One as soon as I see a fraudulent charge.

Re:Credit card numbers WERE taken too

[bendytendril]

I received fradulent charges the day after this occured. My bank called me and I had to cancel my card.

Re:passwords?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get your fucking facts straight.
1. You do not need a CC to get a PSN account. You only need one to buy something, and even then you could buy PSN credits at the store, and buy things on PSN without ever providing a valid credit card number.
2. The game companies that allow you to tie your forum account to your PSN account are irrelevant. None of them require you to give them your PSN password.

This situation sucks, and Sony fucked up big time, but this bullshit FUD everyone is spewing is not helping.

Re:passwords?

[Kuukai]

- If you wanted to play any of the games online, you had to have a PSN account. Which meant you had to provide a credit card whether you were ever going to buy anything or not.

Wrong. This is not true at all. You can play games without ever providing a credit card. On the other hand, they do require your name, birthdate, and mailing address.

Re:passwords?

[xavierpayne]

This is not true. The Netflix app does ask you to log in to the PSN but after 3 failed attempts it lets you into the netflix app anyway and I thus far I haven't encountered any problems streaming even with the PSN itself down.

Re:Leaving PSN Down

[Bobfrankly1]

I think the fact Sony has left the PSN in a completely disabled state for the past week could hint at some internal problems with not knowing what the hell they're doing in the first place. Their servers have been compromised and can no longer be trusted. In my world, that's a perfect time to re-build your systems from a pristine backup. So why doesn't Sony patch the vulnerability and deploy new servers? Perhaps it's because they don't have a clue what the vulnerability is...

FTFY.
Sony said it has temporarily shut down the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services and hired an outside security firm “to conduct a full and complete investigation into what happened,” but refused to offer details on the hack.

Re:Might not be bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, you can store the password as a hash _and_ not transmit it in clear for authentication...

1. server has hashed pw + salt1
2. server randomly generates salt2, sends salt1 and salt 2
3. client calculates x == hash(hash(pw, salt1), salt2)), sends it to server
4. server calculates hash(hashed pw, salt2) and compares to x

result: server has hashed pw and pw is never transmitted in clear...

Re:passwords?

[Tetsujin]

As a previously happy PS3 user, I'm infuriated at their shoddy handling of this whole thing. The delay in notifying customers was inexcusable, and I still don't understand how passwords could have been compromised... I refuse to believe that even Sony would have stored them in plaintext.

Even if you one-way cipher the passwords, getting access to the password database gives the attacker the ability to attack the database offline via brute-force attacks. (Attempting to brute-force without access to the database system would mean you'd have to do it via the login system - which wouldn't work so well if the login system is built to guard against brute force attacks, for instance by limiting the frequency of login attempts to a single account.) So if somebody gets the password database it's safest to assume they've got the passwords in it.

Re:passwords?

[nschubach]

Cancel? Just call up Visa and they give you a new card and number. No need to kill the account.

Re:Might not be bad...

[bigjocker]

No, they not. That's the point of double hashing. If you know 'xyz' you still need to know 'opqr' to send a valid hash (remember that you need to hash 'xyz-opqr' with the session salt). Since the server never sends 'opqr' to the client, the only way to generate it is through HASH(xyz + plaintext_password).