Epic Fail: PlayStation Style

Last week, Sony’s online network for the PlayStation suffered a catastrophic failure through a hacking attack. And since then, the roughly 77 million gamers worldwide like Mr. Miller who have accounts for the service have been unable to play games with friends through the Internet or to download demos of new games.

Then, on Tuesday, after several days of near silence, Sony said that as a result of the attack, an “unauthorized person” had obtained personal information about account holders, including their names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and PlayStation user names and passwords. Sony warned that other confidential information, including credit card numbers, could have been compromised, warning customers through a statement to “remain vigilant” by monitoring identity theft or other financial loss.

And then it gets worse.  A security consultant brings up the real problem with Sony's actions.  It reeks of guilt and realization of a major flaw, one so serious they had no choice but to pull the plug and pray for the best.  This could escalate a simple mistake or an inevitable win for a hacker into a painfully public Shame-A-Thon.

“It is very unusual for Sony to completely rebuild a system after a security breach, rather than just stopping the bleeding and going back to some kind of restricted network,” said Mark Seiden, a longtime information security consultant. “The fact that two separate networks are involved in this security breach suggests Sony discovered a major underlying problem that already existed.”

It remains unclear who the hackers were. Anonymous, a well-known hacking group that has been blamed for previously attacking the Sony and PlayStation Web sites, denied any responsibility; the group’s Web site stated, “For once we didn’t do it.”

There will surely be more coming over the next several days.  I'll update as details are cleared up.  Right now all that we know is Sony has a PR nightmare and access to some accounts has been compromised.  The rest could be the tip of the iceberg or exaggerated speculation.  I don't think this is a death blow for Sony by any means, but this could do damage to online gaming as a whole.  Some of that is going to depend on how far this goes.