The latest news on the PlayStation Network outage is not good. Sony has gone from saying very little about the outage to hinting that someone might have intruded into their network, to now confirming that personal data from users has been stolen.
Today Sony posted the most in-depth blog post to date regarding the debacle. Gone were the vague promises about restoring order to the offline PSN and Qriocity services. This post lists specific details about what was compromised, what Sony is doing to fix the problem, and what information might have been stolen.
They have confirmed that a person or group of people made an “illegal intrusion” into the networks. As a result, Sony’s PSN team took the following action:
- Disabled PlayStation Network and Qriocity services (temporarily)
- Called in a security firm to investigate
- Made changes to the networks to beef up security
Unfortunately for customers, the damage may have already been done. According to Sony, the intruders likely stole your name, address, country, email address, birth date, PlayStation Network and/or Qriocity login and password, and PSN handle/ID. Furthermore, they might have also obtained your purchase history and billing address. And just to make sure Sony twisted the knife fully, they go on to say that they do not believe any credit card data was stolen, but they also cannot rule out the possibility.
The rest of the post explains how you can protect yourself against fraud, including contact information for credit agencies and even the FTC.
Now that we finally know the extent of the damage, it is time to assess Sony’s response. Did Sony handle this well? Should the company have been more forthcoming about what was happening? Alternatively, was Sony too forthcoming? Lastly, what will it take to win back the hearts of its 70 million disgruntled gamers?
And thus far, no comment yet from PlayStation PR firms – which include Porter Novelli as the primary agency, and Voce Communications on secondary issues.