大象传媒

Oh, Sony.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer company given a lot of peoples' current opinion of them.

Reminds me of when Xbox Live went down for 13+ days at Christmas 2007.

It's poor service and should be compensated for. But it's not then end of the world (Unless Playstation Home disappears totally, then technically its the end of A world).

Best rumours so far? PSN became Self Aware on the evening of April 21st and Sony had to take it down before it declared war.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

@ #3

I remember that.

I am surprised at how many people take advantage of other people through hacking and whatnot.

Especially when it comes to public libraries and other places were there is free internet. Keyloging and other programs like that are such a pain. And it's unfortunate that anymore it happens so often.

Technology is awesome. I'm just not sure the need to have your iPad control your TV or have your TV hooked up to your internet is necessary. What's wrong with a regular remote control to watch TV and a laptop to multitask.

Don't get me wrong these sound like kool new toys but it's not really necessary and in my opinion not worth the money.

And unfortunantly 3D gives me motion sickness. :(

With all this hacking online banking seems scary as anything. With countries like China and Iran attacking the US electronically makes me want to unplug my computer and shut off my iPhone.

Read about the thing were the iPhone tracks your movement. Wow that is absolutely messed up. I read an article were everyones information can be bought and sold by huge companies for 3/5 of a cent. it was in a Time magazine I think. And yet this is totally legal as companies get your information from other companies and then they use that to target with advertisements and whatnot.

Technology is good but it's what people do with it that is wrong. Some Yahoo article is also talking about the dangers of "free Wi-fi" at coffee shops and such. People who steal other peopls information deserve to be locked up. What's wrong with going out and getting a real job?

@ TheCommunist

It seems you're confusing hacking and cracking. I get the impression you're using the term hacking in the incorrect popular media way.

Sony's latest statement is fantastic. They start with thanking users for their patience and goodwill and then immediately proceed to state every piece of 'personal' information held by them has probably been copied and pasted to the breachers own computer/server.

It's a little disappointing. I have a few passwords I use for most things and while I appreciate it is not secure to have them all the same, I think a lot of people would admit to having a few passwords they use for many services.

I have a basic 'secure' and 'unsecured' password and generally use the secure password where I really don't want someone logging in and also trust the service provider enough to have sufficient security so that no one can simply obtain my password. My 'secure' password is now potentially in the hands of the unknown individual(s) who breached Sony security. I guess I shouldn't trust large organisations so readily.

And so the hacker has taken personal information.

So I couldn't access PSN and now the person probably has my information.

Sony is awesome but I need Xbox too. Mainly due to Dead Space 2. Although Killzone and Socom 4 are good reasons to keep the PS3. And if all else fails there is always the PC.

Anyone play Portal 2 yet; is it worth buying?

Isn't about time that companies stopped holding credit card information?

Seems like it would save one heck of a lot of problems.

All this goes to show is that EVERY system is vulnerable. All it takes is one. Thankfully I am a PC gamer so the PSN issue doesn't affect me, but I'm not smug enough to think that it couldn't happen to Steam, which I do use.

@11, the trouble is that people use this feature to save time, you do have the option in many cases of the company not holding this information, but people choose the easier option in the real world.

Also, @10, Portal 2 is really good. Haven't had a chance to try the multi-player yet, but the single player game has everything that made the original great, but cranked up to 11. Don't read the comments about the 4 hour time to complete, those are only possible if you know exactly what to do at each puzzle. It easily has a longer single player than most other modern FPS games, though sadly nothing in the region of a proper RPG, but then there are only so many puzzles a designer can come up with.

@9 - one word: Lastpass. It won't help on your PSN but you can use it to generate passwords for websites - just set a good master password.

Back to the topic in hand it is rather negligent of Sony to casually admit it, especially after the amount of time it took them to notify customers. I wonder what a cracker could do in 7 days?
It makes you wonder what the point of local users having strong passwords is really if they're gonna be lost at the other end.

"Will the PlayStation hack impact Sony's Tablet launch?"

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Frankly no. And this whole article is quite insubstantial and rather "the sky is falling"-esque.

The PSN and this Sony tablet are two different markets.

The difference between a tablet and the PS3 is that unlike the PS3 you can get online with a tablet even if the PSN goes down. You will lose some online functionality if certain things require the PSN but I dare say those functions can be replicated by other software running on the tablet, unless Sony lock it down so you can only use what comes on the tablet.

Really Rory if the recent problem with the PSN are a "a crisis for a firm trying to position itself as the major force in home entertainment" then Microsofts Xbox Live would have gone under long before now, as would Steam (which is owned and run by Valve, the developers of Portal 2).

Peoples details are stolen every single day, whilst it is up to a company such as Sony to reduce the likelihood of that happening it is up to us as individuals to be more pro-active in how we run our lives. If you sit back and put credit card details online and don't bother monitoring your accounts for irregular activity then you are asking for your account to be misused, and you have no reason to then blame Sony or anyone else for something which is essentially your failing.

Please Rory do some more research into what you are blogging about.

Yes another example of arrogance and corporate mediocrity. When will these huge behemoths learn that they need to act as servants to their customers rather than masters.

When the customers pay your wages it is good that management recognise the depth of their failure and say sorry.

"15. At 08:33am 27th Apr 2011, DibbySpot wrote:

Yes another example of arrogance and corporate mediocrity. When will these huge behemoths learn that they need to act as servants to their customers rather than masters.

When the customers pay your wages it is good that management recognise the depth of their failure and say sorry."

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Care to clarify that comment?

The PSN is free to use. No-one pays for it.

If you were referring to Xbox live then I might see your point.

But as it is Sony provide the PSN free of charge to customers who have bought their games, people can still play those games offline if they so wish.

And customers have the choice of whether to buy content via the PSN or not.

So just where is the arrogance and corporate mediocrity?

Time for people to take some responsibility themselves rather than handing out the cash and expecting everything to be done for them.

People are getting sadder by the day. If this is even slghtly a problem for anyone they need to take a serious look at their life.

I would never put any trust in the "cloud" and IMO anyone who does is just plain stupid.

"17. At 09:15am 27th Apr 2011, Mubbers wrote:
...
I would never put any trust in the "cloud" and IMO anyone who does is just plain stupid."

heh. I've beeen thinking that for ages. The latest example of this is the new cloud-based music services- now, not only will you not own a physical copy of your music, you don't even have the digital copy. How is this more convenient?

Just wait until you have your access withdrawn by mistake or for violating your terms and conditions. Or you hit your bandwidth cap. Or your local ISP goes down. Or your modem fails. Or your cat chews the CAT5 cable, or...

The_Hess wrote:

@11, the trouble is that people use this feature to save time, you do have the option in many cases of the company not holding this information, but people choose the easier option in the real world.

###

Indeed, but they use it in the knowledge that the data should be secure. If a company cannot guarantee security then they should not offer the ability to store the information.

This works two ways - not only do customers have their information stolen, but the company suffers terrible damage to their reputation.

There has to be a point reached where the fall out form these situations can no longer be justified, where people become rightfully worried about trusting any company out there and simply do not want to put their data anywhere near the internet.

Dead geese and a shortage of golden eggs spring to mind...

@14 - Don't take everything so literally! He means will this PR nightmare mean that people are unwilling/unlikely to trust Sony enough to buy their tablet offerings. However I get the impression that you already knew that and you were being pedantic.

Overall I think that it will drastically damage the public image of Sony & I would imagine that they were relying on the brand loyalty of their PS3 users to boost sales of their tablet. Can't see that happening now.

Also the tablet is linked to the Android version of the Playstation game store which I certainly wouldn't trust with my details now.

"20. At 12:13pm 27th Apr 2011, rjparr wrote:

@14 - Don't take everything so literally! He means will this PR nightmare mean that people are unwilling/unlikely to trust Sony enough to buy their tablet offerings. However I get the impression that you already knew that and you were being pedantic.

Overall I think that it will drastically damage the public image of Sony & I would imagine that they were relying on the brand loyalty of their PS3 users to boost sales of their tablet. Can't see that happening now.

Also the tablet is linked to the Android version of the Playstation game store which I certainly wouldn't trust with my details now."

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Actually no I wasn't being pedantic. I took the question for what it is in black and white.

Would you trust the likes of Orange with your details? They sold customers details on to 3rd party companies, without the permission of the customers, I won't divulge who as they were a government organisation, a client of a company I worked for, but their smartphone users were getting unsolicited calls because of it.

I doubt this particular client of the company I worked for were the only ones whose details Orange sold on.

And yet the buying public still buy Orange products.

As I said peoples details are stolen (or in many cases traded for profit) each and every day. Details that can be used for ID theft are moved around from company to company on a daily basis. And yet people still keep on putting their trust in services that store their details and life goes on.

You are assuming the majority of the general public even know about what happened and why it happened - there are roughly 6.9 billion people in this world, only 75 million people were affected by this outage. That leaves plenty of other people to buy Sony products.

Seems to me that in a few months this fiasco will be forgotten, Sony might lose a few of the fanboys, but on the whole it won't damage them or their product line as the public have a very short term memory.

Take the aforementioned XBL incident in 2007. Hasn't damaged Microsoft's product in the slightest, people still keep on buying it and their user base has grown. Granted no user account details were stolen as it was just an outage of the XBL service, but as I said any company can be a target for what Sony have been, so it's down to the individual user to protect themselves, rather than rely solely on companies like Sony.

Then there is the iPhone 4 signal fiasco - how many units of that have been sold, despite Apple turning round and blaming their customers for not holding the phone correctly?

If you are to say that you can't trust Sony you might as well say the same of Microsoft, Apple, or any other company out there because, whilst they haven't had anything happen yet, the potential is there.

So whose product and services are you going to buy?

Massive PR disaster for Sony, their "new" tablets look like something Jonathan Ive scraped off his shoe.

As for the data loss, it could happen to anyone, but the single fact that all those priceless details were unencrypted could land them in very hot water, isn't it illegal in the EU to hold sensitive data in this way?

@22 whether or not the data was encrypted is entirely rumour mill and, so far, has absolutely no factual basis in truth. It is also highly unlikely.

Sony are investigating precisely what has been stolen and that is why they are currently making a broad statement of all 77m users being effected, with all potential data being stolen, but its unlikely to be everyone and its even less likely to be all data.

Is it frustrating? Sure. Is it worrying? Not really.

By law all UK credit cards/bank accounts have to be insured against fraud by the hosting bank/building society, so even in the (unlikely) event that CC details have been stolen, there is plenty of measures already in place to prevent financial loss to the user.

@21 Last time I checked taking a "question for what it is in black and white" when there is clearly a more reasonable meaning is being pedantic! But that's irrelevant.

You obliterate your own argument by bringing up the XBL outage in 2007 because as you quite rightly state no user details were copied. That is the point with Sony...people moan a bit about outages but quickly forget them if there is no lasting repercussions...now in PSN's case there are potentially very damaging long lasting repercussions...cancelling cards, changing passwords etc. People WILL remember if they are inconvenienced by this.

The tablet will be linked to PSN (therefore making PS3 and the Sony Tablet potentially for the same market) which means that presumably I would need to register with PSN in order to download PS games for the tablet...as far as I'm aware there is no other legal way to easily get PS games onto an Android device? (I'm happy to be proved wrong!) Since this tablet offers nothing, other than the PSN functionality, which differs from any generic Android tablet then that IS the selling point really. If PSN is proven to be fundamentally insecure I can't see people rushing out to sign up!

The negative image will be hard to shift and the coverage that this story has gained (well in the UK at least) combined with a lot of bad press for Sony in the last 12 months I can see this stink hanging around all Sony products for a while.

Like I said the problem is NOT the outage...it is 1. that all the info you gave them has been stolen, 2. that they did not say this was at least a possibility on day 1 and people should be aware 3. if the rumours about how it was done are true then it also shows they have next to no checks on their developers or they trust them all completely...arrogance or ignorance you choose!

"24. At 17:41pm 27th Apr 2011, rjparr wrote:

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You obliterate your own argument by bringing up the XBL outage in 2007 because as you quite rightly state no user details were copied. That is the point with Sony...people moan a bit about outages but quickly forget them if there is no lasting repercussions...now in PSN's case there are potentially very damaging long lasting repercussions...cancelling cards, changing passwords etc. People WILL remember if they are inconvenienced by this.
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The key word there is potentially. Not all user accounts had credit card details stored in them. And as we don't yet know the identity (afaik), motive or plans of the hacker(s) we cannot speculate on what the impact might be.


And do people really remember being inconvenienced by having to change credit card passwords, cancel an old one, order a new one etc. Lets take losing said debit/credit cards, we've all done it at some point, but I doubt that the majority of people can remember exactly when.

There are also measures in place for if the worst does happen and you end up having money spent on the card, yes it does then become a slight inconvenience, but it would be no different if you were mugged in the street.


----
The tablet will be linked to PSN (therefore making PS3 and the Sony Tablet potentially for the same market) which means that presumably I would need to register with PSN in order to download PS games for the tablet...as far as I'm aware there is no other legal way to easily get PS games onto an Android device? (I'm happy to be proved wrong!) Since this tablet offers nothing, other than the PSN functionality, which differs from any generic Android tablet then that IS the selling point really. If PSN is proven to be fundamentally insecure I can't see people rushing out to sign up!

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I am under the impression there will be integration with the PSN, but that does not mean a complete dominance of PSN on the device. One would imagine it will be an Android tablet with all the usual functions of the Android OS, plus integrated PSN functions. Whether the use of those PSN functions is optional is yet to be seen but it would be a bit of an own goal if they locked the tablet down so there is no option but to use the PSN functionality, irrespective of this fiasco.


And again you are assuming that 6.9 billion people minus 77 million users (or however many million it is now) are aware of what happened with the PSN.

Also define "fundamentally insecure"? If a kid can break into the FBI system (as happened once) then surely any security can be breached if the individual is good enough to do so.

----
The negative image will be hard to shift and the coverage that this story has gained (well in the UK at least) combined with a lot of bad press for Sony in the last 12 months I can see this stink hanging around all Sony products for a while.

Like I said the problem is NOT the outage...it is 1. that all the info you gave them has been stolen, 2. that they did not say this was at least a possibility on day 1 and people should be aware 3. if the rumours about how it was done are true then it also shows they have next to no checks on their developers or they trust them all completely...arrogance or ignorance you choose!"

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Well with regards to point 2 - Perhaps they did not know enough to provide users with a definitive answer as to if their account details had been stolen until the time they did so.

However if people are putting their credit card details online they should get into the habit of checking their accounts on a regular basis, daily if necessary, they can monitor the activity on their cards and quite quickly spot any fraud, and as mentioned above there are measures in place to assist the users if fraud does occur.

People need to get out of this attitude that the company they give their details to will protect them universally and they are infallible and will never fail to protect such details.

It is lazy and complacent.

We've actually seen a number of scandals such as this where data has been lost. And yet people carry on buying products and using the services where it happens.

Because people forget and carry on with life quite easily and quickly. And outside of techy circles and those who own a PS3 who have been affected by this, this fiasco is a small fish in a big pond.

The majority of people aren't even aware it happened. It's not headline news, it's buried on the tech pages.

And as I said if you are worried about the security of your data who are you going to buy products and services from? All providers ultimately have the same risks.

I personally think you are crediting the general public with too much nouse, Sony don't only aim at techy people, that's why they've made consoles since 1994.

The "the sky might fall down" concerns are ill founded, sensationalist, and totally out of proportion.

Disappointing to hear Rory so casually (but hopefully not intentionally) drawing parallels between gamers and drug abusers, by talking about "anguished cries from gamers around the world who are kind of missing their fix". Sadly these kinds of attitudes are still common, and having them perpetuated by a 大象传媒 technology correspondent will do nothing to help dispel them.

Non-Microsoft ogranisation has huge security breach that compromises the personal details of 70 million people, affecting data, passwords and credit card information;

"I'm not worried....it's no big deal....who cares....it's your fault anyway....so I have to cancel my card, it's no problem"

Microsoft ogranisation has any security breach that compromises the personal details of even a handful of people;

"OMG!!!!! EVIL M$ AT IT AGAIN!!! I HATE M$!! WHY WASN'T THIS DATA SECURE?? ALL M$ PRODUCTS ARE UNSECURE, THEY ARE SO EASILY HACKED!! I'M MOVING TO LINUX"

Says it all really *shrug*

I love my PS3 and Xbox360.

I can鈥檛 wait to see all the law suits SONY will get for this muck-up.
Im glad Sony doesn鈥檛 run banks.

So I guess there will be another massive OS update AGAIN, to fix SONY鈥檚 bashed in back door.
WHY ARE WE WAITING 鈥淪ONY鈥�, YOU should have had this sorted within hours of the attack.
Pull your fingers out and get us back on-line

Oh well, Xbox Microsoft is working like a charm SONY

@ravenmorpheus2k

"The majority of people aren't even aware it happened. It's not headline news, it's buried on the tech pages."

I agree with most of what you say, but this is headline news...it has been reported on 大象传媒 Breakfast and evening news and also on Channel 4 news. Very prominent coverage is being given to it around the world so I do think that some damage has been done.

That said, I do think the damage has been insignificant in real terms and the likely net result is that Sony will continue to shift units of all shapes and sizes (including their new tablets which are de rigueur at the moment!) but less people will provide card details on PSN.

By next week this will be old news...

29. At 17:14pm 28th Apr 2011, rstreetuk wrote:

I agree with most of what you say, but this is headline news...it has been reported on 大象传媒 Breakfast and evening news and also on Channel 4 news. Very prominent coverage is being given to it around the world so I do think that some damage has been done.
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Really? I thought the Royal Wedding was headline news. Certainly seems to have buried all other news this week. ;-)

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"26. At 00:06am 28th Apr 2011, Richie P wrote:

Disappointing to hear Rory so casually (but hopefully not intentionally) drawing parallels between gamers and drug abusers, by talking about "anguished cries from gamers around the world who are kind of missing their fix". Sadly these kinds of attitudes are still common, and having them perpetuated by a 大象传媒 technology correspondent will do nothing to help dispel them."
---

Judging by the contribution from willg33 I believe Rory was right to equate gamers frustrations at missing out on online playtime with a drug users need for a fix.

Apparently some people think IT people can wave a magic wand and everything can be back up in hours.

What willg33 and no doubt all the other PS3 owners who are exhibiting nerd rage over this fail to understand is that Sony will not put the PSN back up until they are confident they are protected against further breaches of security.

That will take time, as we are seeing.

Of course they could just switch it all back on again and willg33 can have his details stolen again.

Great - more spam and fraudulent credit card transactions coming up... not to mention my wife banning from playing PS3 as a precautionary measure.

Having been away on holiday, I havnt missed my PS3 at all.
I'm home now, so, come on Sony, get your stuff together.
QUICK!

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

@19 No company could guarantee such a thing. With stakes so high; there will always be entities out there with the ability to illegally access such customer information. Companies should certainly be held to keep customer information as secure as possible, deal with any breaches as best as possible and then do their best to prevent it happening again (which Sony appear to have done), but to say they must guarantee such a thing is firstly unfair and secondly just not possible.