Sony Online Entertainment Services Follow PSN Down

nam37 writes "Sony Online Entertainment's various services seem to be down and a message on the official site does not give much information on the particulars. According to a short post on the site, the services were taken down after an investigation revealed a deeper 'intrusion' than expected at first. This is the first we have heard that Sony's MMORPG arm had some sort of security breach. This could be part of Sony's plans to beef up security for the PlayStation Network, but this message seems to indicate that something more serious going on."

Comments

Wanted: New Media/Customer Relations Dept

[jarden_from_cerberus]

Sony really needs to get better at communicating with their users and the press about these issues. Leaving everyone in the dark just fuels speculation and makes for infuriated consumers. Just give us a high-level explanation of what is happening and a reasonable estimate of how long it will take to fix, please, and stop jerking us around.

Re:Wanted: New Media/Customer Relations Dept

[Sir_Sri]

from the sounds of it they don't have a high level explanation to give. There may be cultural things about not explaining how exactly you fucked up that go with it too, but given that we're seeing this quite a bit later than the initial breach it seems like they may still be figuring out just how bad things are.

Re:Wanted: New Media/Customer Relations Dept

[MoonBuggy]

Sony has done a great deal to incur the wrath of an awful lot of geeky people, and their failure to understand that aspect of the market may be their downfall.

I certainly hope so, but it seems to have done them very little harm so far. The CD rootkits got a lot of internet ranting, but didn't actually seem to impact sales in any appreciable manner. Hotz talked about forcing them to fight in court, but he caved when he realised just how unpleasant they could make his life (an issue of the legal system, certainly, but that's a separate matter). The disappearance of OtherOS hasn't actually led to any successful claims against Sony that I know of. The list goes on...

Maybe this'll be the straw that broke the camel's back, I suppose - even if all those other things didn't really damage them, it's not like there's any goodwill left either. Although personal data leaks tend to generate a bit of hot air in the mass media, they rarely deal a critical blow to the company in question; cutting off millions people's entertainment, on the other hand, is likely to provoke a reaction much stronger than they're used to dealing with.

It was the Sony DRM!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone tried to play a Sony music CD in one of their Windows servers during a maintenance window, and the SBRK (Sony-blessed rootkit) decided it had found some pirate MP3...

Re:It was the Sony DRM!

[medv4380]

Now that would be funny. What would be funnier would be if they actually used the same master key for PSN and Sony Online that was in the PS3.

Bury that thing in concrete

[vlm]

Bury that thing in concrete, push it into the ocean, or inject seawater.
Every day, they admit its getting a little bit worse. Just a teenie tiny little itty bitty bit worse.
It might take months, years, maybe, but we'll finally learn its a complete utter disaster.
They are doing a good job of keeping themselves in the news by releasing a little bad news each day. No such thing as bad publicity, I guess.
Oh wait, were we talking about Sony or the reactors here?

Nothing was 'stolen'

[countertrolling]

They sold the info and covered it up with this 'break in' ruse to avoid possible criminal charges..

Sony email

[symes]

I received an email yesterday evening from Sony (presumably) to say that all the info I had given them might have been accessed. Funny thing is, although I have a PS3 I've never signed up to PSN, and would certainly not have provided the email address that I received the email on. I have, however, given sony my details when registering Sony products, warranties and so on. So I'm thinking that either that email from Sony was a scam, but there was no real scam element to it, or there is something a lot more serious going on. Maybe I'm paranoid.

So, no Star Wars Galaxies??

[elrous0]

That will really piss off dozens of people, you know.

Re:So, no Star Wars Galaxies??

[Pollardito]

I think SOE did enough damage to the people who played SWG without also losing their credit cards 5 years later

Vigilante Justice

[mlwmohawk]

I'm sure no one believes that this is not an example of vigilante justice being played out against Sony. This is deeply concerning.

As police, lawmakers, judges, and governments become more and more puppets of corporate interests at the expense of the rights of citizens, I fear that vigilante justice will be the only avenue through which to seek justice. The basis of a working society is a working justice system. If citizens can not find justice officially, then they will find it unofficially.

I am reminded of a quote from "Young Frankenstein" "A riot is an ugly thing, and I think it is just about time we had one."

Re:Vigilante Justice

[Attila Dimedici]

I do not believe that this is an example of vigilante justice. I believe that it may be an example of vigilante justice. However, simple criminal greed would also explain what happened here. It is possible that some criminal hacker targeted Sony because they thought there was a particluar weakness in Sony's security that they could take advantage of and, that of the likely targets, Sony was the one most likely to yeild a large amount of profitable information. Of course, it could also be someone who targeted Sony because of Sony's various transgressions and figured that anyone who did business with Sony deserved to be ripped off. At this point, there is insufficient evidence to reach a conclusion.

Re:Vigilante Justice

[ElectricTurtle]

I think you might want to reexamine the history of high-profile robberies. People like Bonnie and Clyde or D. B. Cooper are romanticized, aggrandized, and sometimes in some circles elevated even to folk heroes. So long as it doesn't personally affect them, people frequently think that daring acts, even crimes, are admirable. Human nature can take some interesting twists.

Re:Vigilante Justice

[mlwmohawk]

Sony pissed off a lot of geeks, many of whom are smart and amoral

I think it is too easy to dismiss hackers as "amoral." I think very much it it probably not the case. I think hackers probably consider themselves as very "moral."

The problem with morality is that it is a subjective term.

Re:Vigilante Justice

[l0ungeb0y]

"So long as it doesn't personally affect them"

Key words here.

A few people have already reported unauthorized credit card usage following the PS3 break-in.
No word on anything widespread yet, but it's more likely going to lead to a rash of cases of identity theft.
So yes, this will effect people personally.

However, I don't think this will make people cling harder to corporate interests, rather I think it will make them more suspicious and less trusting of corporations and web services in general. Just look at old people who lost their life savings when their bank went tits up during the Great Depression. Many still prefer to put their money under a mattress than entrust their money to a bank.

Re:Vigilante Justice

[Attila Dimedici]

Sony claims to have taken down the systems themselves. You claim in a later post that you think it improbable that Somy was able to detect the data breach and yet have to take an extended time to fix the problem. This does not seem at all improbable to me. There have been several cases where companies have reported data breaches where the companies were not particularly computer savvy. It does not seem at all improbable that Sony became aware that there had been a data breach but was not sure (or maybe flat out didn't know) how the system had been compromised. Or even took the system down thinking there was a minor breach and as they investigated discovered the system was more thoroughly compromised than they originally thought (perhaps including new backdoors being introduced by the original hackers).

Re:Vigilante Justice

[mlwmohawk]

If you think that morality is a subjective term, you are amoral.

Well, if you think "morality" is not subjective, you lack any knowledge of history or cultures other than your own. Morality is very much the product of culture.

An islamic family is trying to perform an honor killing of their daughter for adultery. To me that is immoral. To them it is highly moral. I may commit, what is to me, a "moral" act and try to save her. To them, I would be acting immorally preventing them from acting morally in their culture.

One can still act morally while having different morals than others. Amoral means you have no morals.

Re:Vigilante Justice

[smelch]

All i heard was "BLAH BLAH BLAH I'M SMART! If you think differently than me you have no freedom. All freedoms come from doing what I agree with!" So you'll forgive me if I call you a fucking idiot. You are a fucking idiot.

Re:Vigilante Justice

[darkgrayknight]

If all things are relative, then your statement holds no meaning.

Re:Wanted: Executive Seppuku

[Anonymous Coward]

Hirai or some other high ranking executive, footage be posted to Failblog and Youtube, then we reconsider, thank you.

Re:Ya know I just

[eepok]

It's not Sony that may have irreparable damage done to them... it's the users.

Re:Not relevant.

[0123456]

I don't understand how this relates to US Navy Seals killing Osama bin Laden.

A lot of them will be pissed off if the servers are still down when he respawns next week.

The voices in my head...

[Andy Smith]

The voices in my head keep saying words like karma, comeuppance, just deserts... and then laughing maniacally. We live in an age when large companies can no longer treat people badly with impunity.

(*) Yes only one 's' in deserts.

Re:The voices in my head...

[zeptic]

Yes only one 's' in deserts.

Do you need help counting?

Not surprising

[j1976]

I have gotten my SOE account "hacked" (using SOE's terms). So has a close friend, and several other people I know of. Ok, if it had only been me I would have assumed it was an isolated incident even though I can't even begin to guess how my password got out in the wild. When this many people got their accounts taken over in such a limited time, I do no longer believe this was a problem on my side. However, trying to get anything other than "update your antivirus" out of the SOE customer support is an exercise in futility.

My qualified guess is that the recent security breaches aren't in any way exceptions: Most likely Sony/SOE have had security problems for several months now and have tried to keep a lid on it. But as said, that's just my guess.

Sorry

[zeptic]

At least they are sorry: http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Technology/Sony-PlayStation-Bosses-Bow-In-Apology-Over-Security-Breach-That-Hit-Millions-Of-Online-Accounts/Article/201105115983171

How is the possible?

[medv4380]

Did Sony use the same PS3 root key to encrypt their password files or is their a simpler bonehead explanation.

Many months ago

[__aaqvdr516]

A few months ago my Station account was hacked. I had not used it in around 5 years. On that day my SWG account was reactivated with a monthly subscription using a credit card with my name on the account. The credit card had an address listed in a state I've never lived in. I saw the same story in forum threads when I was looking for information on how this happened.

I'm betting that they've been testing the water with the accounts they scraped for months.

Re:portal robot did it

[SCPRedMage]

If this is the quality of trolls we get, yeah, I'd say it's stagnated...

This is what may have happened

[AftanGustur]

Sony puts some basic PSN services back online.. and in the process opens for DNS services for top-secure servers behind 4 firewalls (as could be seen in the Sony slides)..

This allows malicious code running on those servers to resolve the name of the C&C servers and start beaconing out ..

Security specialists on site see it, say WTF!, and shut the whole network down ..