As most of you will know, PlayStation Network hasn’t worked since April 20th, so no PS3 user couldn’t play online or enter to the PSN site, which allows PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable users to download games, movies, and music online. It was really rare that there were problems with it, because it has always worked very well. Nobody knew what was happening, it appeared a message on the screen “Ongoing maintenance processes”, but two days ago, Sony admitted that they shut down the PlayStation Network because they had discovered an external intrusion.
A hacker, an unauthorized person, gained access to gamers’ names, mailing addresses, birthdays, mail addresses, passwords and logins. The worst thing is that the intruder also got access to users’ credit card data! The PlayStation Network, serves a reported 77 million accounts worldwide, making this one of the largest breaches of personal identity data ever. And I’m one of them!
This will make a lot of Sony consumers to lose confidence and faith in the brand, and for sure it will affect future sells. There have been several complaints by PS3 users, who are very pissed off, firstly for not being able to play, and secondly and most important, for having their private personal information stolen.
Security analysts said that the problem may mean that hackers have uncovered a fundamental flaw in Sony's networks which will be expensive and time-consuming to fix. So we don’t know we this will be fixed.
Carles
