The other night I decided to play some game on the PlayStation 3, Little did i know it would turn into something much worse.
After spending about 3weeks without the ps3 after sending the thing for a repair for a disk issue, basically my ps3 either turned into HAL as a 3 year old with disks, Every few times when ejecting the disc it would start to eject than take the disc back in as if playing a game of keep away. When it started to happen I had called sony and was surprised by the tech support figuring that they would tell me that the drive has to blow up in an epic explosion – or you need mr scott to beam the disc out. Instead they offered to service the system. Thankfully the disc was not stuck in the system, anyways fast forward a few weeks after impatiently waiting to have the system back….
Around april 20th I figured i’d play the PS3, I was greeted by the PlayStation Network giving an obscure error code. “error 80710a06” while trying to log into the Playstation Network
Looking up the error code was more annoying when it just said general error and to contact support. Double FUCK! after doing some self support, It became appearent the error was not on my end – and for my part of things I went a little overkill on trying to resolve the error. After a few tries to fix things on my end, i figured it would resolve it self by morning thinking that the error was, PSN was under maintenance or it was being DDOS’ed by people.
Sony at the time was silent on the issue which was strange, On the other hand gaming sites were surmising that the PSN was getting DDOS’ed by Anonymous, if that were the case there would of been at least an intermittent connection. By the afternoon Sony released two statements via the PSN blogs,
it was still investigating the cause of the outage and that it would be “a full day or two” before everything is back to normal.
While on the Europe PSN blog they had a different post.
“An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services. In order to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward, we turned off PlayStation Network & Qriocity services,”
At that point it seemed sony had no clue exactly what was going on with its systems and I’m not sure if they have a clue now to whats going on now.
On the 23rd.
We sincerely regret that PlayStation Network and Qriocity services have been suspended, and we are working around the clock to bring them both back online. Our efforts to resolve this matter involve re-building our system to further strengthen our network infrastructure. Though this task is time-consuming, we decided it was worth the time necessary to provide the system with additional security.
We thank you for your patience to date and ask for a little more while we move towards completion of this project. We will continue to give you updates as they become available.
Bad isn’t the word for it. FUCKING OMG WTF would be the closer statement. rebuilding the system? Something REALLY bad happened, Reason I say that is when a system is infected with malware – You don’t “rebuild” the entire system, you remove the malware and try to prevent it from happening again. The error page for the error code also had changed to say “Issue with the PlayStation network” Since the error was relatively undisclosed till this happened i think likely this is a code disclosing some kind of error with the service itself. Moving on..
April 25 had the same vague message about what exactly had happened
I know you are waiting for additional information on when PlayStation Network and Qriocity services will be online. Unfortunately, I don’t have an update or time frame to share at this point in time.
As we previously noted, this is a time intensive process and we’re working to get them back online quickly. We’ll keep you updated with information as it becomes available. We once again thank you for your patience.
When you run a service with millions of users and not having a timeframe of any sort , basically that’s code for for FUCKED.
The following day the 26, a more detailed but yet still vague message was given.
Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve the current outage of PlayStation Network & Qriocity services. We are currently working to send a similar message to the one below via email to all of our registered account holders regarding a compromise of personal information as a result of an illegal intrusion on our systems. (cut for length)
also
There’s a difference in timing between when we identified there was an intrusion and when we learned of consumers’ data being compromised. We learned there was an intrusion April 19th and subsequently shut the services down (again cut for length)
Pretty much at this point that’s where it stands with Sony , Vague messages and vague answers. but, whats highlighted above is making a possibility of a few things. Noticeably missing is the word hacked, there seems to be some very careful wordplay at hand.
Rebuilding/Intrusion/Compromised/outage, rather than say right out hacked they beat around the bush, and that makes me wonder if it was more than a hack. because of the timing and the extreme downtime. I could just be theorizing but, being down for as long as it has the PSN maybe damaged beyond expectations. Rumors have been going around for months about the lack of security with the PSN and the PlayStation itself, around Christmas the playstations security was broken and allowed custom firmware and backups to be played, and it was pointed out actually how poor security was on the system side, basically 1 key opened every door.
The most curious thing is sony’s move to rebuild the Playstation network, that in itself sounds ominous when you really start to think about it. Since this breach happened around the same time anonymous attempted to attack the PSN and blame was thrown towards them at first and still is along with the people whom have hacked away at the firmware. The release of the root key may have had a bit to play in this. Sony in the past has not known to be very good with security. With the root key released It made me wonder if they implemented a poor point to point security in memory where client to server to client communication was not encrypted allowing access to sniffing communication with the servers.
But, the effects are not known of exactly the damage caused and its curious that Sony is “rebuilding” the network- reason being is since the attacks by anonymous, it laid the path to a convenient timing to execute an attack on the servers, and wondering if this was your recreational hacker or a hellbent hacker that decided to take out the network by gaining root access or trunk access, Since details are still at a minimum from Sony, it makes me wonder if someone went all out and had a Die-hard Fire sale, Take the DB down download all information than followup by deleting the entire database and maybe more. Since there is no indication of sony using back-ups to bring the servers up it does indicate that some sort of shitstorm has hit. Also the fact that they have no clue to what data has been taken is very interesting, pretty much everything is a MAYBE.
we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password 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.
As it stands it would seem the PSN will not be up for more than a week at current, and hopefully some more details with come out that will give us a better idea of what occurred.
Until more is learned, I don’t think it was something done by anonymous, Nor any of the people who released the sony root key, perhaps more of a side effect of, there have been a few non-confirmed credit card fraud uses popping up so far, and again until more details are reveled we are in the dark on this one.