Sony Delays PlayStation Network Reactivation

i4u writes "Earlier this week chatter in an IRC network led to speculation of a third attack on Sony's network. For its part, the company steadfastly promised that at least some services would resume by the end of this week. But now it looks like Sony has given up on that goal. The PSN reactivation has been delayed. Sony's explanation? They were 'unaware' of the extent of the attacks on their system."

Comments

Not Aware?

[Squiddie]

Well, what ARE they doing scheduling reactivation if they are not aware of the extent of the attacks? Something tells me that Sony just has poor handle on everything security related.

Re:Not Aware?

[0100010001010011]

I've seen hamsters escape.
I've seen chips use tools at the zoo.

Don't degrade them by lumping them in with Sony Security.

Re:Not Aware?

[node 3]

Well, what ARE they doing scheduling reactivation if they are not aware of the extent of the attacks? Something tells me that Sony just has poor handle on everything security related.

Really? This is something you are berating Sony for?

They are doing the exact right thing here. First, they assessed the damage and worked to get PSN up as fast as possible. During that process, they discovered that the intrusion was more extensive than they thought, and instead of simply bringing PSN back up on their original schedule, they are allowing new information to alter their plans.

If this were some Linux archive, like for example sourceforge, or the Debian repositories, and they did the exact same thing, you'd be heaping praise upon them for doing the right thing and not adhering to bullshit corporate image demands, but since it's Sony who's doing the right thing, it must be bad somehow, right?

Re:Not Aware?

[TemperedAlchemist]

And something tells me you should read up on your computer forensics. Not knowing the extent of the damage immediately is common in most computer forensics investigation. At the end of the day you're simply pointing your finger at Sony without evidence or legitimate reason. Skepticism is good, criticism without reason or evidence is foolish.

Re:Not Aware?

[Anrego]

Just re-image all servers running the thing, one by one, to ensure no backdoors remain, and bring it all back up.

One would assume they are also beefing up security to prevent this from happening again. Re-imaging the servers back to the state that let them get hacked in the first place is probably not sufficient. Tell you the truth I can't see how they could do anything substantial within a period of weeks to take them from the clearly messed up state they are in now to a state where people will trust their info with Sony again. Something like this should take months.. but the horde of angry gamers won't wait that long.

In this case we have an army of paying customers locked out of a major feature of the product.

Indeed. That month of free access to something most people don't care about isn't gonna cut it for many. Sony is gonna have to make some serious reparations here. They've probably already lost a metric ass-tonne of customers regardless of what they do at this point, and there are probably a group of customers who don't care about this outage and will stick with playstation regardless. The larger middle angry gamer group however, they are going to need to find the right balance between cost of lost business and cost of keeping that business. Should be interesting to see what they do.

Re:Not Aware?

[node 3]

Wow, this is a new low for Slashdot. I'm a "shill" for not being a fucking moron who thinks it's impossible for Sony to ever do anything right? When your shit gets hacked, you take it offline until you can put it back up safely. This isn't being a "shill", it's just being rational and not being a whiny little bitch just because we are supposed to hate some company.

Re:Not Aware?

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

I always figured 3 chimps and a hamster were far more likely to randomly type out some Perl than they would Shakespeare.

Re:Not Aware?

[arcade]

Just re-image all servers running the thing, one by one, to ensure no backdoors remain, and bring it all back up

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a perfect example of how Sony /not/ should do it.

The gentleman known as "shutdown -p now", seems to suggest that Sony should use their energy to get the servers back into a state where they can be re-breached within minutes of going back online!

Of course, this is exactly what we should expect from armchair know-it-alls. One should not trust sysadmins / system engineers who knows the situation and how to take care of it. The armchair know-it-all will scream "No! They made it this bad in the first place" - without caring one moment to think about the layer known as "management". The layer that demands that "if it works, do not touch it at all! it works! Downtime is Verboten!"

It doesn't take two weeks!

They have to:
  1. Remake installation routine
  2. Reinstall servers
  3. Reinstall software
  4. Reload the user data .. this is probably done within a day or two.

Then they have to:
  5. Harden the new systems.
  6. Harden the firewalls.
  7. Pentest the shit out of it
  8. Get it audited.
  9. Re-harden, according to audit-report
  10. Get audited again.
  11. Repeat the two steps above until audit report is clean.

And this didn't even touch onto the huge topic of making sure that there isn't any breach of workstations that can be used to gain administrative access to the systems and so forth. It doesn't touch upon the topic of verifying user data integrity. It doesn't touch upon the topic of checking for backdoors that gains the attacker elevated access to the network, without admin privileges (but with an easier attack vector from being completely outside).

Meh!

Re:Not Aware?

[DrXym]

You deserve a refund if you are on PSN+, you deserve an apology and some form of compensation as goodwill for the time you lost playing online. You absolutely do not deserve a refund on the price of your console or your games. With the exception of purely online games, all the rest work perfectly well in offline mode until the service returns given that PSN is not mandatory for most games except for the likes of MAG.

Who & Why

[F34nor]

is this black hat or revenge for the removal of install other os?

Re:Who & Why

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

My suspicion(totally without any unusual knowledge, of course) is that it is a mixture: The core penetrations, and the exfiltration of CC details and other identity-thefty stuff look a lot like the usual commercially motivated electronic criminal activity. However, the sorts of people who do that are opportunists, and generally not morons: Sony's current deep unpopularity with a segment of ideological hackers/bored 4channers likely provides both a certain amount of 'free' security testing done by third parties and then dumped into forums and chatrooms, there for the taking, and provides a certain amount of concealment: If only through sheer bulk, wading through all the not-too-competent attacks mounted by assorted under-18s who would probably get a month in juvy and are barely worth hunting down, in order to pick out the sophisticated operators is going to be rather more difficult than just finding the sophisticated operators.

As for the support/goodwill thing, I suspect that those doing the attacks aren't really interested in that. The professional thieves, of course, don't care; because they are there for the money. Any ideological attackers don't care because they are there to make Sony bleed and/or clearly demonstrate the vulnerability of services and hardware cryptographically locked to a single service. The support of Sony's customers is worthless to them; because(by design) Sony's customers have basically no power. Creating as much angst and suffering among those customers, on the other hand(in addition to any amusement that might be derived) hurts Sony's commercial standing.

Re:Who & Why

[Pharmboy]

Occam's Razor may apply. - I thought I read that they were running an unpatched version of Apache on a system without a firewall, including here on /. The motive could have simply been "low hanging fruit with a high return". The real question is "why the hell did it take so long for someone to pwn them?"

Assigning it to "them black hat hackers" seems akin to them blaming Anonymous. Normally, if it was done for hactivism, someone would have taken credit for it by now. The simplest explanation would appear to be that they did it to make money.

Re:Who & Why

[Z34107]

Yay, let's take revenge on the removal of OtherOS by removing the remaining features from our PlayStations, and those of all our friends! Pissing off the gaming community is sure to garner their support and goodwill!

The "gaming community"? Do you mean the petulant whiners who think George Hotz is paying his lawyers in stolen CC numbers? Or the ones who seem completely oblivious to the months of identity theft hell they're about to face because of Sony's incompetence?

Of course, leaving all that information completely unsecured would've been perfectly okay, if not for those meddling kids.

In seriousness, Sony's incompetence is borderline illegal. But, you think this is homebrew's fault?

Re:Who & Why

[UncleTogie]

Incorrect if you live in Texas; it's illegal to leave your keys in an unattended car.

Here's a link from the Texas DMV stating as such: http://www.txdmv.gov/protection/auto_theft/hold_key.htm

Here's a link to the actual statute: http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/TN/htm/TN.545.htm#545.404

This .PDF will show that one and some other minor offenses you might not have been aware of. http://www.tmcec.com/public/files/File/The%20Recorder/2003/NL11_03.pdf

I know what's holding everything up.

[Lose]

They're having problems re-sorting all their credit card data stored on the admin's desktop by penis again. They must not have taken a screenshot.

This could take ages.

Translating corporate-speak

[Animats]

Sony:

"We're still working to confirm the security of the network infrastructure, as well as working with a variety of outside entities to confirm with them of the security of the system. Verifying the system security is vital for the process of restoration. Additional comprehensive system checks and testing are still required, and we must complete that process before bringing the systems online."

To understand this, read VISA International's "What to Do if Compromised..

"Working with a variety of outside entities to confirm with them of the security of the system." means VISA International and/or MasterCard, Inc have invoked their contractual rights to send in auditors, security experts, and computer forensics experts. They do that for big security breaches. "Additional comprehensive system checks and testing are still required, and we must complete that process before bringing the systems online." means "VISA, etc. won't let us go back on line until we pass their security tests."

So Sony isn't entirely in control of when they go back on line.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

[SniperJoe]

I hate to defend Sony here (it'll probably cost me some karma), but it seems like they're in a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" scenario. A week and a half ago, they disclosed the nature of the personal information breach and everyone seemed to be clamoring about how long it took them to say something. In this case, they release more information during their press conference a few days later, then they discovered that it was a bit worse than they had thought and now everyone is pointing the finger at them because they released information that was incorrect. In a perfect world, we would all be able to release completely accurate information right after the event, but everyone here knows the difficulty in that.

Re:Two weeks was fraudulently optimistic

[lennier]

Look at what they're doing here:

      - completely rearchitecting their security and network

      - completely reimplementing their security and network

      - physically moving the servers

      - redeploying this worldwide

You forgot:

* deploying mirrorshades razorgirls to the BAMA Sprawl to hunt the console cowboys who cracked their ICE
* impersonating the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority
* burning Chrome

I love living in the squalid cyberfuture.