Although I love the occasional hour or two per month of Call of Duty or Spyro, I'm not a huge gamer. However, if you own a PlayStation, you may have noticed in the past week or so that you can't play it on-line! According to the New York Times, this freeze in Sony's PlayStation network is due to an anonymous hacker attack. Since the attack, almost 77 million gamers have been unable to play their PlayStation's on-line. Several days after the attack, Sony reported that "an 'unauthorized person' had obtained personal information about account holders, including their names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and PlayStation user names and passwords" (par. 3). Um, uh oh! What's even worse than your personal information getting out for all of the world to see is your CREDIT CARD information getting out for the world to see! Sony advised their customers that their credit card information could have also been leaked during the attack so they should remain alert to their bank accounts (par. 3).
Sony is also losing business, in addition to money, because of this attack. While the PlayStation network is down, kids and other gamers have turned to Microsoft and Nintendo products to entertain themselves until Sony is back up and working. Who knows if the customers will stay with Microsoft and Nintendo once Sony gets back up and running? According to New York Times, Sony has decided to rebuild the network to make it more secure (par. 10). While that might sound like a good idea, Sony is actually losing more money and more business than if they decided to do a quick-fix and get the network back up and running as soon as possible.
So, if you're a Sony PlayStation fan and have been off-line for the past two weeks, be cautious with what information you put in your on-line account!
Photo Courtesy of: Joey Yen
Dear Mallory,
ReplyDeleteI love this topic! My husband is a HUGE gamer so he knows all about this. Although he's not big on playstation, he still stays up to date with it.
The hackers were actually from a hacker group called anonymous. They did to get back at Sony for suing one of the fellow hackers very harshly. It's great to see this story actually getting coverage.
Although, the hackers do have access to all the playstation passwords, according to the gaming blog, it was all just to shut their programming down. Hopefully, this is the real reason.
Thank you for the great post! I love the topic and think it's great you wrote about it.
Springbok
Dear Mallory,
ReplyDeleteI was very interested in this topic. I am a member of playstation network. This is a huge problem involving a lot of people. The hacker got into the network, an 100 million plus accounts. This has stopped the online play for playstation network. The hackers have access to everyone accounts. This stuck out a lot when I saw you write about this subject. This can mess up a lot of money and customers that sony has. Hopefully they resolve this problem soon as they can.
Thank you for posting this blog. I enjoyed this topic.
House Finch