PlayStation®Network Technical Solutions

[FurySevenSix]

The latest information on the PlayStation Network service outage.

Hi All,

Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve the current outage of PlayStation Network & Qriocity services. The following email has been sent to all PSN registrants; please read the help and support FAQ for more information.

Valued PlayStation Network/Qriocity Customer:

We have discovered that between April 17 and April 19, 2011, certain PlayStation Network and Qriocity service user account information was compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into our network. In response to this intrusion, we have:

1)     Temporarily turned off PlayStation Network and Qriocity services;

2)     Engaged an outside, recognized security firm to conduct a full and complete investigation into what happened; and

3)     Quickly taken steps to enhance security and strengthen our network infrastructure by re-building our system to provide you with greater protection of your personal information.

We greatly appreciate your patience, understanding and goodwill as we do whatever it takes to resolve these issues as quickly and efficiently as practicable.

Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state/province, zip or postal code), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity passwords and login and handle/PSN online ID.  It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained.  If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence that credit card data was taken at this time, we cannot rule out the possibility.  If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, to be on the safe side we are advising that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may also have been obtained.

For your security, we encourage you to be especially aware of email, telephone, and postal mail scams that ask for personal or sensitive information. Sony will not contact you in any way, including by email, asking for your credit card number, social security, tax identification or similar number or other personally identifiable information. If you are asked for this information, you can be confident Sony is not the entity asking.  When the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services are fully restored, we strongly recommend that you log on and change your password.  Additionally, if you use your PlayStation Network or Qriocity user name or password for other unrelated services or accounts, we strongly recommend that you change them, as well. 

To protect against possible identity theft or other financial loss, we encourage you to remain vigilant to review your account statements and to monitor your credit or similar types of reports. 

We thank you for your patience as we complete our investigation of this incident, and we regret any inconvenience.  Our teams are working around the clock on this, and services will be restored as soon as possible. Sony takes information protection very seriously and will continue to work to ensure that additional measures are taken to protect personally identifiable information. Providing quality and secure entertainment services to our customers is our utmost priority.  Please contact us at uk.playstation.com/psnoutage should you have any additional questions.

Sincerely,

 Sony Network Entertainment and Sony Computer Entertainment Teams

We will continue to keep you all updated with any new information as soon as it becomes available via the forums, PlayStation Blog, Facebook and au.playstation.com

Cheers

FurySevenSix  

[BadNewsAllen]

those hacker scum must of really done severe damage for the entire psn being down for more than a week now. i understand the psn is a "free" service but this much downtime with nothing but the same generic updates makes me wonder

forget about crap like Qriocity/7/ABC/HOME just rebuild psn so we can play games, the store and chat

[Renze]

@FurySevenSix: Could you please ask up the chain of command and find out whether our passwords were stored in plaintext or if they were hashed (one-way encryption).

If they were stored in plaintext then there is definite grounds for legal action, regardless of immediate damage or lack thereof. Anybody who stores passwords as plaintext in this day and age is, to put it bluntly, a moron who does not deserve to keep his/her job.

[Windslot]

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/27/qa-1-for-playstation-network-and-qriocity-services/

Could be wrong here but I would think the password would fall under this bit of that Q&A:

"The personal data table, which is a separate data set, was not encrypted, but was, of course, behind a very sophisticated security system that was breached in a malicious attack."

[Renze]

Yes. that's why I asked about the passwords. The common procedure is to have passwords one-way encrypted, but you can't do that with names, addresses, etc. I wasn't sure if the password fell under the "personal data table" or not.

[sidawg2]

As in store them as "*********" rather than "Password"?

[Renze]

No, as in store them as "29f33cab54c2a8858885b95d8fbb7ff1" rather than "Password". Then, when somebody logs in, you encrypt their password with the same encryption and compare it to the encrypted version in the database. If they match, they get logged in.

(The above code is "Password" passed through md5sum. There are better one-way encryption algorithms, but md5sum will do for this example.)

[PoisonCobra]

so...no updates since the 27.04.2011?.

[Renze]

There have been plenty of updates since 27/4... take a look at http://blog.eu.playstation.com

[edgelett01]

i really do appreciate Fury posting updates for us.

The blog is helpful too.

It would be useful though if we could get an estimate of how much longer the PSN will be down for.