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After Outage, Sony Makes Peace Offering To Users of PlayStation Network
An anonymous reader notes that Sony is offering deals to make up for the downtime over Christmas. "PlayStation Network gamers didn't have such a happy holiday thanks to the reported handiwork of some hackers, so Sony is hoping to appease users of its online gaming service with promises of deals and discounts. For Playstation Plus subscribers, Sony is offering a 5-day membership extension, and for all members, a 10 percent discount at the PlayStation store, according to a blog post published Thursday. The PlayStation Network is Sony's online service for its PlayStation game console. Both PSN and Microsoft's online gaming service, Xbox Live, were intermittently offline beginning on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Xbox Live came back online first, with PSN following Saturday night."
They're really skimping now.
Fix your security issues instead, and stop blaming 3rd world nations for your own incompetence.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Great!
"Sorry you couldn't play the games and hardware you paid for, please buy more from us at a marginal discount."
Think about it.
Have gnu, will travel.
There's no excuse for making gamers spend time with their families on Christmas, damn it.
Great strategy for Sony...
(1) Retroactive tax write-off
(2) Increased damages claims against the perpetrators
(3) Marketing opportunity
(4) Increased sales due to putative discount, front-loaded into the post-Christmas slump quarter
What's not to like about this for Sony?
They're offering peace to their customers in the form of more golden showers.
For Playstation Plus subscribers, Sony is offering a 5-day membership extension, and for all members, a 10 percent discount at the PlayStation store, according to a blog post published Thursday.
Not all days are created equal, Sony. And ten percent is deeply insulting.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have a counter offer for Sony. When they cease to exist, I will stop hating and boycotting them.
The estimated costs (estimated by others) for the PS+ extension, is ca 5 mill USD. Add in the cost of the 10% discount.
Question is now, does this cost more, or less, than implementing a design where a (regional?) PSN server-set is not a single-point-of-failure for every online game?
Even when signed in, I could not play any games, due to a too-tight reliance on PSN's services.
On the other hand, I suspect that many Sony employees had a much less pleasurable time of cleaning up the mess.
Payback for the CD Rootkit they infected millions with is sweet irony. I cry tears of joy every time I hear about Sony getting hacked. No company deserves it more.
In other words, Sony gave them nothing.
Reminds me of a recent bad experience with Jet Blue. Not only was the flight an hour late, but when we arrived, they lost our stroller, which we had to check at the gate. We ended up leaving about 2 hours late. If it weren't for the constant screaming of our 2-year-old, that wouldn't have been so bad. I realize that people deal with a lot worse, but the $30 off our "next" flight was really lame, considering that we're unlikely to be flying with them again within the year they give us to redeem it. Really, all that discount is is lock-in to ensure they get more of our business, which makes it not really a discount.
Even when signed in, I could not play any games, due to a too-tight reliance on PSN's services.
"Any" games? Or just multiplayer ones, because single player games and single-player modes worked just fine. I played Diablo UEE on the PS4 during some of the outage, it defaulted to LAN mode when it couldn't reach PSN.
I feel like quoting Thomas Hesse (who was their President of Global Digital Business during the Rootkit distribution) again: "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Well, judging from how little the average manager knows about IT, I can deduce that they don't even know what a DDoS is either.
Well? Do you care about it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Even when signed in, I could not play any games, due to a too-tight reliance on PSN's services.
"Any" games? Or just multiplayer ones, because single player games and single-player modes worked just fine. I played Diablo UEE on the PS4 during some of the outage, it defaulted to LAN mode when it couldn't reach PSN.
Sorry, I was less-than-clear in that statement: I could not play any ONLINE games(*) due to [..] PSN - see previous sentence pointing to PSN being a single-point-of-failure specifically for online games(*).
*: online-only; I do not have any online-games for PS4, where a single-player component can be played offline, though I do have a game where the single-player component requires PSN access (Destiny)
Yes their are, at least if you have a size like Sony.
There are two distinct kinds of DDoS. First, attacks that rely on a weakness in the software used or its configuration. They use bugs in software or flaws in implementations or protocols to overload the system. Not by flooding it with traffic, but by clogging other resources, e.g. ram or ports. An example for such an attack would be Slowloris, targeting webservers, but there are others (let's be blunt here, TCP is far from DoS-proof in most implementations). That needs little bandwidth on the attacker's side, and it actually doesn't even produce a lot of traffic.
The other kind is what we usually think about when hearing DDoS, i.e. lots and lots of packets stuffed into the pipe of the target computer until it croaks under the load. Such attacks are harder to mitigate but far from impossible. There are various ways to execute such an attack, and in general what is done here is to spoof a request with the target computer's IP as the sender, where the request uses little bandwidth but the reply would use lots of it. DNS spoof attacks are the most common kind in that respect (and, bluntly again, how long 'til we finally switch to something more secure than UDP for a critical web infrastructure tool like DNS? It really boggles the mind).
All those reflected DDoS attacks have one thing in common: When you know what's hitting you, you can rather easily react to it. Usually, though, this requires the aid of your upstream provider, and depending on the size of the attack this can well mean that you have to deal with entities that don't really give half a shit about you if you're some local provider who has a few 1000 customers in some remote area on this planet. Then, you're up a certain creek without propelling tools. But we're not talking about miniISP here, this is Sony. And I highly doubt that Sony could not get adequate aid if they really wanted to get it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Does that happen still?
Wow!
Like I said, no simple countermeasures.
Please cite some examples of similar services that were attacked by a similar attack and managed to stay up and still be useful to the users. I don't doubt it's possible. But let's see some examples.
PSN has absolutely nothing to do with Sony Pictures. They happened to be owned by the same multi-national corporation, but don't share a damn thing.
-- Will program for bandwidth
A bunch of dicks launched a DDOS attack on them. They're victims as much as their own customers. I appreciate their gesture but I wasn't expecting anything at the same time.
PSN has absolutely nothing to do with Sony Pictures. They happened to be owned by the same multi-national corporation, but don't share a damn thing.
Other than a common name and association.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
I cannot. For obvious reasons.
No company wants their customers to know that they're under attack. There is some diffuse distrust when someone is telling you that they're currently or even constantly besieged by bad guys. People don't like to hear that. They want to hear that everything's peachy and that nothing could possibly harm the service they are about to sign up for. So if they successfully mitigate the attack and have it fail, you will not hear about it.
Even if I potentially knew about a possible attack happening, maybe right now, to some important service, you could rest assured that I'd be under some kind of "we get to kill your firstborn if you even think about blabbing" NDA.
You only get to hear about something like that when there's no chance anymore to hush it up because it gets obvious. Everything below that is "technical difficulties" that "we are working on".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No one with any decision making ability at Sony was inconvenienced by the outage on Christmas.
It was the grunts, doing the same kinds of jobs that most of the people posting here do, who had to go in and try to fix it instead of spending the day with their families.
Since you are boycotting them how again were YOU hurt by the PSN outage?
Sony deserves hatred. And they have hurt me, by filling my news pages with their ineptitude of being hacked, what, two, three times in 2014 alone? Go away Sony and go away Sony lover.
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