Hackers Come At Sony Again Compromising 93,000 Accounts
posted Sunday Oct 16, 2011 by Jon Wurm
With the PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment networks falling victim to some nasty outages caused by DDoS attacks on their lacking infrastructure in April this year, Sony took it upon themselves to completely revamp their systems and gain back the trust of those who had their accounts compromised, which included encrypted billing information. It cost them millions in legal battles and lost revenue along with the cost of revamping their infrastructure only to have it happen all over again 5 months later and this time they don't have E3 right around the corner to smooth things out.
On the 12th of October Sony announced that its networks had once again been breached. The damage doesn't seem to have gone as deep as the previous attacks as there didn't seem to be any outages. The attacks affected 60,000 Sony Entertainment Network and PlayStation Network accounts, as well as 33,000 Sony Online Entertainment accounts, resulting in 93,000 really unhappy users. Sony detected the attack after a huge amount of username and password matches were initiated against Sony's database.
Sony's Philip Reitinger, the chief information security officer, said that the accounts that were breached have been locked and that users billing information shouldn't have been compromised but it is possible unauthorized purchases had been made. They are also sending out emails to owners of the compromised accounts requiring them to verify before access is granted. Everyone on the PSN and SEN will also be required to reset their passwords, for which Sony suggests you use a strong one. At the moment, it doesn't seem like there will be any other reprieves for users. Sony did seem to act quickly when implementing damage control, which is its own reward, compared to the attacks in April so maybe that'll be good enough.