psn

Friday Poll: Hackers' response to Sony breach fair?

When I first signed up for a PlayStation Network account years ago, never did it occur to me that my personal information would end up in the wrong hands. A wide-scale breach of a major game network of that size had never really happened before. Gamers safely played under a digital umbrella--now an illusion--of a secure network, thinking Sony was large, powerful, and had the resources to thwart any attack.

Then down came the rain--hard--and washed the illusion away.

The next blow, should it happen, could prove to be one of the worst public relations disasters to ever strike a consumer electronics company. Hackers say they have access to some of Sony's servers and plan to publicize all or some of the information they can copy from those servers. This may include consumers' credit card details. (A source tells CNET that this group of hackers claims to have access to Sony's servers, which are different from the servers already hacked to expose more than 77 million user accounts.) … Read more

Bin Laden raid live-blogged (week in review)

Twitter was where many people got news of the death of Osama bin Laden, but it was also unwittingly an excellent venue to follow the raid as it happened.

Speculation that American special forces had killed Osama bin Laden, perhaps the most wanted man in the world, first began to trickle out when the White House communications director posted on Twitter that President Obama planned to address the nation Sunday evening. A onetime chief of staff for former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld was credited for the Twitter scoop when he posted this note: "So I'm told by a … Read more

Sony CEO Stringer apologizes for PlayStation breach

Sony Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer apologized today for the PlayStation Network breach, as meanwhile the company released specific details regarding the identity-theft monitoring promised to its customers whose personal information was exposed in the cyberattack.

Sony has made a deal with identity-protection firm Debix to offer a service called AllClear ID Plus for free to U.S. customers registered with PlayStation Network or Qriocity prior to the attack two weeks ago, Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold wrote in a blog post today.

Stringer today publicly apologized to customers for the first time in a separate letter posted to the PlayStation … Read more

N.Y. attorney general subpoenas Sony

The top law enforcement official for the state of New York wants to know more about how Sony's data server security was circumvented in a cyberattack on its PlayStation Network two weeks ago.

On Tuesday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued a subpoena to three of the company's business divisions--Sony Computer Entertainment America, Sony Network Entertainment, and Sony Online Entertainment.

The subpoena is the latest step in probes by legislative and law enforcement officials into what enabled a hacker to gain access to the names, addresses, birthdates, e-mail addresses, and passwords of more than 100 million … Read more

Why has Sony's CEO remained silent on security breach?

We've asked a lot of questions about the Sony security breach, some of which Sony has been able to answer. But here's a big so far unanswered one: where has Howard Stringer been?

As chairman, chief executive, and president of Sony, he's been strangely silent on the failure of his company's networked entertainment security systems, which were hacked more than two weeks ago.

When PlayStation Network went offline April 20, Sony communicated with customers via its official PlayStation Blog. Company spokesman Patrick Seybold periodically posted tidbits of information about the outage and repeatedly apologized for the … Read more

Senator slams Sony's response to security breach

Governmental pressure is building on Sony for more information about its apparent security problem.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) sent a letter to Sony today criticizing the company's handling of a massive security breach that affected its PlayStation Network accounts two weeks ago, according to a New York Times report. The letter comes on the heels of yesterday's revelation that more data may have been stolen as part of the computer attack.

"I am deeply concerned about the egregious inadequacy of Sony's efforts thus far to notify its customers of these breaches or to provide … Read more

preGame 50: MotorStorm: Apocalypse

On today's 50th episode of preGame we'll round up all of the PSN news, including the highs and mostly lows of the now weeks-long outage.

Would you rent games from a box? For $2 a day, Redbox is doing just that. In addition to DVD and Blu-ray rentals, Redbox will start renting video games in 21,000 out of their 27,000 locations. We're encouraging our preGame audience to write to us about this experience when the rollout begins next month.

Today's demo is MotorStorm: Apocalypse, the latest in the PlayStation 3 exclusive racing franchise. Apocalypse … Read more

The 404 812: Where can you, like, turn down your keyboard? (podcast)

Wilson joins us on the show, Max Headroom style from the CNET office in San Francisco. Tune in to the first half where we grill him about his loyalty to the East Coast and why he refuses to take showers in the office. We also have a couple stories in the rundown about teens asking Yahoo about Osama Bin Laden, a Nintendo 3DS augmented reality icon, a Japanese kissing machine, and yet another privacy breach from the already befallen Sony PlayStation Network.

The 404 Digest for Episode 812

Japanese engineer creates Facebook kissing machine. Dude tattoos Nintendo 3DS augmented-reality icon on his arm. Yahoo search trends prove teens don't know Osama bin Laden. Sony hacked again.

Episode 812 Subscribe in iTunes (audio) | Subscribe in iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

The PlayStation Network breach (FAQ)

It's been a roller coaster of a couple of weeks for Sony and its customers.

At first what seemed like an embarrassing network outage that kept customers from accessing PlayStation Network, Sony's online game play and streaming video service, turned out to be much worse: a sophisticated cyberattack made off with the customer data of 77 million PSN and Qriocity customers.

Sony wasn't very forthcoming with information at first--it was a couple days before it acknowledged why PSN was offline, and two days after that it confirmed the security breach. Then over the weekend, the No. 2 … Read more

Sony to restore PSN services, compensate customers

Two weeks after Sony's PlayStation Network was hacked Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment, addressed the issue in a press conference in Tokyo tonight.

Though they still don't know who orchestrated the intrusion on the PSN servers in San Diego, Calif., they were "very sophisticated," Hirai said. It's still not entirely clear what kind of data the hackers got their hands on, but he reiterated that they don't believe credit card data to have been taken and added that the company has received no complaints of identity theft or credit card fraud yet.

Most services will be restored "within the week," Hirai said. The first PSN services to come back online will be online game play for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable, the ability to play downloaded movies from PSN, and unexpired movie rentals through PSN and Qriocity and chat functionalities.

"We are aiming to restore full services including the PlayStation Store and purchasing features within the month," Hirai said.

The breach took place between April 17 and 19, but Sony didn't tell its 77 million customers until April 26 that their personal information, including names, addresses, e-mail addresses, birthdays, PlayStation Network and Qriocity passwords, and user names, as well as online user handles, had been obtained illegally by an "unauthorized person." … Read more