It seems like only yesterday that we were plastered with daily news about the PSN being compromised. Well, at least this time it seems debacle levels are low. Yesterday Philip Reitinger, SVP & chief information security officer for Sony Group, made a post on the PlayStation Blog stating that they detected attempts to test a massive amount of sign-in IDs and passwords against the network database. In English, someone got a hold of a bunch of usernames and passwords, then attempted to try them out on the Sony network.
While the vast majority of attempts failed, Sony admitted 93,000 accounts globally between PSN, SEN, and SOE were successfully logged into. While it may seem like a lot, that’s less than one tenth a percent (0.1%) of their account base. Sony is currently reviewing the accounts they identified as being accessed through unauthorized means. As a preventive measure, all of the accounts that were affected on PSN and SEN will have a forced password reset; more than likely the next time you log in to whatever service your account is on. SOE customers that were matched have been disabled for the time being. Those SOE users will be receiving an e-mail with instructions on how to validate your account.
More than likely many will be pointing the finger at Sony on this one, but in reality it is unlikely that this is their fault. The great PSN hack of 2011 was caused by a vulnerability on the PSN servers, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here. Sony believes that the source of the data came from the compromised lists of other sites and services. Let’s be honest with ourselves: we know that the vast majority of people use the same username and password for every site they frequent on the internet, so this doesn’t sound too far-fetched. Sony says they will keep us up to date as they get more details. Hopefully this one stays a small incident, as I’m sure we are all tired of hearing about gaming services being hacked.
[Source: PlayStation Blog]
