As everyone who is a gamer is aware, game companies have been subject to hackings and DDOS attacks in recent months, and many people are vocal about this, including the design director for Epic Games Cliff Bleszinski.
When asked by IndustryGamers what his reaction to the PSN hacking was, his colorful words were “It f***ing sucked! I think dealing with hackers is a very sensitive thing, because if you piss off the wrong hacker group, they can really get to your stuff and mess you up.”
“It’s just a shame. It cost them an untold amount of money; I know developers who couldn’t put their betas out there because of it. I mean, it was a major problem. So it’s pretty scary to be a game developer, especially when you talk about there being a connected future.”
It’s a sad thing in this future that entire companies are at the mercy of hackers, even though we have the tools to stop them in their tracks. Basic things like disconnecting the main internal network from the outside internet or encrypting user details properly. Looking at you Sony.
Online networks that provide a service can be DDOSed at any time, and any network that uses credit card data can have it stolen if the details are not kept protected properly. These days, security that includes a retinal scan, fingerprint ID, and a password written in Sanskrit is what people expect to be between a hacker and their information. What protections do we have against this? Passwords, but there’s always a security hole somewhere that screws you over.
It can be a scary job if you work in something like politics, where a bad decision will infuriate a huge amount of the country and perhaps a few lunatics, and your name will be plastered all over the news. This kind of mentality should never extend to an industry where people are simply providing entertainment for others, it’s disgusting we live in a world like this, isn’t it?
If this keeps up, it might get to where making a hacking threat will be treated the same as calling your school and making a bomb threat. Extreme, but those kinds of measures might be required in the future if these issues aren’t resolved.
Viligeidiot
As was stated, threats of hacking may have to be treated like bomb threats… well technically, it should ALREADY be treated that way because after all, a threat is the perception of possible damage whether real or perceived and authorities really need to be taking this more seriously. I’m actually surprised that the U.S. ISN’T doing exactly this, in a country where you receive more jail time for robbing a bank than actually killing somebody, it shows their priorities are monetarilly motivated and malicious hacking threatens businesses and people EXACTLY in that regard where productivity is lost and money needs to be spent in the form of computer security.