It was an inevitability that Sony would get hacked to pieces. "Tin Foil" Alex called it back in 2006.
Well how wrong was Alex back in 2006, the former chairman chose a pretty poor post to quote from. The Blu Ray drive still hasn't been hacked and the PS3 was the most secure console in history. There's no denying what happened has been catastrophic but is there any console manufacturer out there who could seriously prevent intrusion with so much attention from the hacking community on them. I really don't think anybody should be taking any pleasure from what has happened. This has hurt Sony but has also hurt the industry as a whole. This will have affected consumer and developer confidence when things were looking good. Anybody wishing Sony would withdraw from making consoles is an idiot. Yes we are generally divided between the three big manufacturers here but to lose one would be a disaster. Nintendo are Nintendo and their history alone means we need them, Sony brought gaming to the masses and has built a developer network others can only envy and Microsoft have defined how online gaming should be and given Sony some stiff competition in the hardcore market which has led to both companies striving for the best which has been great for consumers. Although children may think hacking is cool and mysterious it is bad for everyone. Over 15 years ago I was one of the lucky kids to own a Commodore Amiga 1200 which to this day is the best machine I have ever had. It was so user friendly and Workbench was miles ahead of Windows. The first multi tasking OS if I remember correctly. Anyway what I thought was a plus at the time played a huge part in the demise of Amiga and that was copying games. I don't think I ever bought a game, I used to travel to car boot sales every sunday and pay either 50p or £1 per floppy disc, I then used to go home and use X-Copy or D-Copy to make more copies for my friends. I was too young and naive to realise that I was damaging Commodore by using these tools provided by hackers and that is something I deeply regret. Over the next decade Commodore went under and the Amiga brand passed between other manufacturers until it eventually died. If Amiga was still around to day I don't think I'd be running Windows 7 on my VAIO right now, we'd be much further ahead than we are now. My point is we shouldn't be accepting what these hackers do or even embrace them, we should shun them and despise them. They only damage the industry and in the end it is us the consumer who suffers.
Well said. On a possibly related note my mum has recently been receiving spam emails from my yahoo account, the same yahoo account that's tied to my PSN account. I haven't sent any emails from that account to anyone for months. Needless to say I'm changing all my internet passwords right now.
another day and another service compromised. this time Sony Online Entertainment: http://www.neowin.net/news/sony-online-entertainment-shuts-down-servers-due-to-unnamed-intrusion
In yesterday's blog entry Nick Chaplin, the Head of Communications, explains that passwords were not stored as plain text, rather they were hashed. This is really important statement. It puts into question all the statements that someone HAS actual passwords. This is because, assuming that Sony didn't use one of compromised hashing alghorithms like MD5, unusual passwords are very likely safe. You just can't easily "unhash" anything hashed with strong hashing function. Anyway, since mine password was 13 characters long and it's a combinations of lowercase/uppercase/digits, there's a high probability that it's just safe. http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2011/05/02/playstation-network-security-update/
Given enough time someone with the password file will get the passwords. The issue then is people who use the same password and email address for multiple sites might get compromised else where.
The fact they got into two distinctly seperate systems indicates that there is more to the hack than Sony are letting on. If these people have got in the backdoor at the service end then it's highly likely that the hash table and decryption/encryption tools were also compromised.
Should I cancel my current credit card for a new one? I really don't know if I will get 'randomly selected' out of 70m users for the hackers to steal some of my balance.
That's the whole point; no one knows what's going to happen, if anything. If they really do have all of that card and security data then your odds are 1 in 70'000'000 which isn't bad going until you consider that the data can go public by being posted on bulletin boards or newsgroups and then your odds decrease depending on how many people get the data...if it ends up china we're all fooked.
Doubt it will be random. The numbers will most likely be sold on the black market for less than a dollar a piece. Those numbers are then bought by groups of individuals who are capable of making large numbers of purchases in short amounts of time. Proactive credit card companies will be canceling cards they think are at risk since they are the ones who will legally be responsible.
The numbers can't be used without the security numbers so unless you go around giving people the security number for your card I reckon you'll be ok.
Thats not entirely true. The CCV code is used during electronic transactions but backup transactions don't need it. Also if you believe the stories from the reputed hackers they have all of your data including CCV and to be honest this whole situation has been an enormous clusterfuck since the start so I'm inclined to believe it.