Slashdot Mirror
Sony Fined In UK For PlayStation Network Hack
Sockatume writes "The UK's information protection authority, the ICO, has fined Sony for failing to adequately secure the information of PlayStation Network users. The investigation was triggered by a 2011 security breach, during which personally identifying information (including password hashes) was recovered from a Sony database where it had been stored without encryption. In the ICO's view Sony's security measures were inadequate, and the attack could have been prevented. The £250,000 (ca. $400,000) fine, the largest the ICO has ever imposed, is equivalent to a few pennies per affected user. Sony disagrees with the ICO's decision and intends to appeal."
It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: Slashdot is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently IDC confirmed that Slashdot accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all forums. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Forum Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Foreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Slashdot because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Slashdot is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot leader Rob Malda states that there are 7000 users of Slashdot. How many users of Reddit are there? Let's see. The number of Slashdot versus Reddit posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Reddit users. Kuro5hin posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Reddit posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Kuro5hin. A recent article put Slashdot at about 80 percent of the forum market. Therefore there are over 9000 Slashdot users. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of LinuxVA, abysmal sales and so on, Slashdot went out of business and was taken over by Dice Holdings, Inc. who sell another troubled forum. Now it is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among forum hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
Fact: Slashdot is dead
Encryption's been here for -how long-? As a standard, over a decade before you were hacked; I think more like a decade and a half. And you have a high profile. And you store credit card information.
Eat it.
GBP 250,000
That's a lot of money. I'm sure a multibillion sized corporation will really sit up and take notice. If they keep on doing that, say several hunded thousand times per year it might even affect their bottom line.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If companies start to realize they're legally on the hook for data security maybe they'll start trying harder.
So many of these security stories sound like they had a co-op student do it in an afternoon with no consideration for anything other than getting it done quickly.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Does anyone else find it funny that they were disciplined by ICO, one of the few things Sony has ever gotten right?
I'm so sure that will get them to shape up right away...
Maybe it's time to start enforcing corporate fines as a percentage of current market cap, payable by newly issued stock to the regulatory agencies. That would deflate the value of the existing stock, getting the shareholders to whip the company into line (hopefully). Also, too many repeat offenses would give the regulators increasing control over the company itself. After 5-10 years, allow the company to buy the stock back.
How many developers do you think it'd take to secure Playstation Network? Because 250K will barely get you a single developer for three years (paying the developer 60K a year plus 20K for office space and some part of the salary for a manager, HR person, IT department, etc)
Sony understands the importance of providing service to their customers, and are on schedule to achieve their 'five nines' in network reliability in the year 8583.
Lets face facts here...
Over the course of the past few years mastercard, paypal, a dozen or so game companies, a couple middle eastern governments various police agencies and hb gary (a god damn cyber security company of all things) all get hacked by the same orginzation as sony did. All those companies were damaged, they had tons of personal data leaked onto the net and worse. But for some reason everyone wants to only hate sony and blame sony.
So if you want to blame sony for poor security then why arent you blaming the other couple dozen orginzations and goverments that were hit harder with more security damaged?
Thats as stupid as if someone robs 4 houses on a street but blaming one house out of that dozen for all the robberies and trying to sue them. They didnt do the robbing and they got robbed just like everyone else did.
Oh and guess what? Sony reported the breach faster than anyone else did. They also offered free identity protection to ALL OF THEIR CUSTOMERS, for free. And in the end guess what else? No real information was leaked that was viable. Why? Because the needed secure data was actually secure and seperate. So yeah they got credit card numbers but they had no routing numbers, no names and no CCV codes to use them with. No one had their identity stolen, no credits were frauded and nothing bad happened. Can you say the same for the other places annonymous hacked? No you cant.
So why blame and hate sony? Ill tell you why, because you dont know why, all you know is its the cool thing to do and people lined up in droves to bash them and trying to get a handout in form of pointless lawsuits and fines.
This is not the largest fine for data breaches imposed by the ICO.
The largest went to Brighton and Hove NHS hospitals, after they contracted with a data destruction firm to destroy hard drives used by the HIV clinic. A staff member of the destruction contractor stole the drives and forged a destruction certificate, before selling the drives on eBay where they were picked up by a data recovery firm among other people.
The hospital was fined £325k. It is not reported what happened to the data destruction company.
Only way they'll learn. If you can't secure credit card information securely, don't store it at all?
Just the cost of business.
Now if they actually jailed the person in charge of infosec, that might get something to change.
All that information is just sitting their exposed by default, and in some cases exposed regardless of user intervention because there is simply no option to disable it.
Facebook would reverse the big bang because of how hard they would get sued for information leaks.
So, why not them too? They are the worst information leak offenders of today.
I kind of like sony, I have a Vita(not because of Sony but because it has reasonable third party support here in Japan, I really enjoy the library so far) and a Xperia phone(decent phone with great looks). But holy crap, their security setup pre-hacking was something a baby could build better. Considering the amount of DRM they put on their products, I would at least expect they take server side security and data encryption seriously. The PS3 took 5 years to get hacked, but the PSN goes down in a few days by a bunch of script kids? WTF!? $400000 is pocket money even for sony, the penalties should be much harsher so that sony doesn't not ever decide to commit the same mistake ever again but also to scare other lazy companies in to upgrading their cloud services.
Fine a drop in the bucket compared to the PSN store being down for several weeks. Games released when PSN down also did not sell well. They also purchased credit card theft insurance for all their users who had credit card info on PSN. They also had to give out free games to get people to bring back good will from users. So even without fine the market punished Sony quite a bit.
Sony lost plenty of money when the store was down. Disk based games didn't sell because people wanted to play multiplayer. Consoles didn't sell because of the bad press. DLC and PSN games didn't sell because the store was down. After it came back up many people removed their credit card info and stopped buying DLC and PSN games.
Someone breaks in your home and steals your address book, you then sue the owner of the book for not securing it? UK logic is fun.
It's a PR slap, the money is irrelevant, it's what could be done, and i wish we would do more of that at here in the US.
Alot of sensitive information was let out into the open, and i was affected in that i had to get a new card. Not a problem. Then it happened again.
So i get another new card, and i now have a fancy blu-ray player, completely isolated and not connected, not subscribing to or buying anything. Not a problem.
...I still can't figure out what grounds Sony could possibly have for an appeal.
They "Strongly disagree" with the ruling. I suppose it's in their best interests to disagree, but based on the publicly known information about this hack, how could they possibly hope to succeed in overturning this ruling?
Fuck Geohot and the shitheads responsible for this!
--
Marcan, professional asshole
Karma baby