PS3- It only does everything– Including leak your personal info online. PSN mysteriously went down last week, and while Sony initially claimed the outage was caused by “maintenance,” it has since become clear that the act was the result of malicious hackers, and now Sony is admitting that the hack has resulted in millions of PSN users’ personal info being leaked, with the possibility that credit card info was stolen as well.
In a somewhat vaguely worded post on the official Playstation blog, Patrick Seybold, senior director of corporate communications for Sony, admitted that the hackers successfully managed to obtain the personal info of everybody with a PSN account, including names, addresses, birth dates, email addresses, and passwords. Seybold then went on to state that while Sony doesn’t think the hackers managed to get a hold of credit card info, they couldn’t “rule out the possibility.” then proceeded to warn any PSN users to watch for suspicious activity on their bank or credit card accounts, and then linked to several identity theft and credit card fraud security services.
To make the situation worse, it appears Sony knew about the hack and proceeding threat of identity theft at least a week ago; reports are appearing online from users who have contacted their banks and/or credit agencies to cancel and replace their cards, only to learn that Sony had warned these organizations a week ago about the leak of information. Why Sony chose to wait a week before publicly disclosing this information is currently unknown, and there’s already been an uproar of complaints and outrage on the internet from users who are understandably upset that Sony didn’t warn them earlier.
Infamous hacker group Anonymous, who recently started a campaign to publicly humilate and hinder Sony, has claimed no responsibility for the hack, and has even issued a press release stating that this particular incident was in no way related to their on-going battle with Sony. Regardless of the culprit, the hack has gotten the end results that Anonymous wanted: Sony has been publicly shamed and is left with one hell of a public relations mess to deal with. Obviously, nobody is blaming Sony for being hacked, as that was out of their control, but what Sony really needs to answer for is why they waited so long before telling their customers that their personal info was compromised.
Source: Offical Playstation Blog
Rian Quenlin
Anonymous are advocates of internet privacy and neutrality for the most part. If they were behind it, stealing the personal info of countless people is something they wouldn’t dare do to innocent people, most of them probably fellow /b/tards or Anons. They’re pretty much the definition of Chaotic Neutral.