Sony has been pretty quiet this week. After missing its deadline for beginning the reintroduction of PSN and Qriocity services, the company has taken to its blog only once. On Tuesday the company posted a short message to say that it would be ‘a few more days at least’ before PSN comes back and that it was sorry it didn’t have anything more to tell users.
However, the company has been quite chatty behind the scenes. The company this week penned a letter to all of its publishing and development partners. Signed by Rob Dyer, SVP of Publisher Relations, the letter has been obtained by Industry Gamers and the site’s source says he received the communication on Wednesday.
The letter contains a lot of information we already know. Sony’s taken the opportunity to rehash the timeline of the attack and reiterate for the umpteenth time that there’s no evidence to suggest credit card information was stolen. However, what it doesn’t contain, is any acknowledgment of partners’ claims that they’re losing significant amounts of money because of the downtime. Sony has not yet publicly discussed any plans to compensate developers and publishing partners for loss of revenue related to the outage.
Yesterday Capcom’s senior VP Christian Svensson told users on the company’s Capcom Unity forums that it was losing ‘hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in revenue’ as a result of the outage.
Do you think Sony should compensate its partners? Let us know in the comments below!
Sony’s letter publishing partners:
Dear Partner:
As you know, certain PlayStation Network, Qriocity and Sony Online Entertainment service user account information was compromised in criminal attacks against our networks. I want to assure you, as a PlayStation partner, that it is Sony’s top priority to restore our network operations and see that business is returned to usual as soon as possible. We are working around the clock to restore service, but will do so only when we can ensure that the network can operate safely and securely. In the meantime, we greatly appreciate your patience, understanding and goodwill.
What Happened?
• On Tuesday, April 19, 2011, Sony discovered that several PlayStation Network servers unexpectedly rebooted themselves and that unplanned and unusual activity was taking place on the network. This activity triggered an immediate response.
• Sony mobilized a larger internal team to assist the investigation of the four suspect servers. That team discovered the first credible indications that an intruder had been in the PlayStation Network system, and six more servers were identified as possibly being compromised. Sony immediately decided to shut down all of the PlayStation Network services in order to prevent any additional damage.
• The scope and complexity of the investigation grew substantially as additional evidence about the attack developed.
• The forensic teams were able to confirm that intruders had used very sophisticated and aggressive techniques to obtain unauthorized access, hide their presence from system administrators and escalate privileges inside the servers. Among other things, the intruders deleted log files in order to hide the extent of their work and activity within the network.
• On Sunday May 1, using information uncovered by the forensic teams, engineers at Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) discovered that data had also been taken from their servers. They, too, shut down operations and on Monday, May 2, announced the discovery.
What Data Are Affected?
As you may know, personal data was stolen from approximately 77 million PlayStation network and Qriocity service accounts.
As of this writing, there remains no evidence that the credit card information was stolen and the major credit card companies are still reporting that they have not seen an increase in fraudulent transactions due to this event.
What Steps Are Being Taken?
We have taken aggressive action to give consumers peace of mind, protect them against the abuse of their data, and enhance our security systems moving forward.
We have already advised our consumers in the U.S. that we will offer complimentary identity theft protection services through a leading provider, including an insurance program of up to $1 million. Similar programs are being developed in other markets around the world.
In addition, Sony is taking a series of steps to enhance security of our network infrastructure. They include but are not limited to:
• adding additional automated software monitoring and configuration management to help defend against new attacks;
• enhanced levels of data protection and encryption, as well as additional penetration and vulnerability testing;
• enhanced capabilities to detect software intrusions within the network, unauthorized access and unusual activity patterns;
• implementation of additional firewalls;
• expediting a planned move of the system to a new data center in a different location with enhanced security; and
• appointment of a new Chief Information Security Officer.
Finally, to thank our customers for their patience and loyalty, we are offering them “welcome back” packages as soon as the networks are restored, including free downloads of selected PlayStation entertainment, 30 days of free service as well as service extensions for the number of days PSN and Qriocity services were unavailable, with similar benefits for Music Unlimited subscribers.
Looking Ahead
We of course deeply regret that this incident has occurred. We are working closely with the FBI to identify and apprehend the culprits who committed this crime against our consumers, our partners and our company. I know you can appreciate how widespread the problem of cybercrime is in society today. Although no company is immune, we are confident our consumer data will be protected by some of the best security measures available today.
As a valued partner we aim to keep the lines of communication open so that you are aware of our progress. Our focus has been to confirm the security of the networks, protect customer data and get the services back on line as quickly as possible. We will do our best to respond to all of your inquiries and we will do everything we possibly can to support you.
We are doing everything we can to bring these services back online as soon as possible. We will update you with more information as soon as we can, but please call your account executive if you have further questions. We thank you for your patience and look forward to moving ahead together in the months and years to come.
Very truly yours,
Rob Dyer
SVP, Publisher Relations
I didn't know someone was killed during this process.
Forensics is a broad range of subspecialties which use techniques adapted from the natural sciences to obtain criminal or other legal evidence.
Don't make it sound like (1) companies can avoid getting hacked and (2) that every company has information paramount to what you see present in financial institutions. Your idea of someone "being paranoid everyday" would just have instant appeal to anyone obviously; "hey want a 100% stressful day where you're afraid of everything!". Yes I can see the appeal of that.
No company is going to get the type of team or security measures in place that has a pretty good defense unless its a pretty high, up~there financial institution and even then it'd be easy to at least attack it to investigate for further vulnerabilities and rip out some info.
People want to keep pirating games and bit**ing they can't, really whatever, just stoping your whining about Sony. When my friend was a developer his basic feeling was "I created some content and yea its feels shitty people just wanting it for free". Individuals who keep complaining about "oh when the other OS was around sh*t was fine" seem to ignore how much sh*t was and still is being pirated for the PS3.
At this stage, if Sony wanted to pay for all of these enhancements, guess they should just charge a monthly fee and follow the XBox 360 because all of this sh*t with Anon, players and other developers being attacked is getting out of hand and ridiculous at this stage.
Did you miss the bullet point?: appointment of a new Chief Information Security Officer.
Either they sacked the old one or they didn't have one.
If they sacked the old one, then we are seeing what happens when penetration testing was not done properly.
If they didn't have one, then Sony was negligent.
Either way... Sony is to blame here.
Next question: Would we even be here if Sony had not remove OtherOS, followed by GH publicity?
I think not.
You do know the hack was done using a KNOWN vulnerability right? They claimed that they did not know about it at the time but that either shows that they dont keep up to date on the security of the software that they are using or they're lying and they didnt want to cough up to upgrade the software.
so either way sony failed to protect its users and the publishers
You can see the detail info from www.Engadget.com