1. Sony, PSN and SOE: The Latest Victims
The PSN and SOE intrusions are the latest massive data breaches and leaks. We've looked at nine other cases of hacking, espionage and plain old corporate stupidity.
The last month or so has been a total mess for Sony, it's PlayStation Network and more recently it's Sony Online Entertainment division. The now-settled lawsuit against the hacker known as George "GeoHot" Hotz and the subsequent attacks by the netizen group Anonymous were just the beginning. The PlayStation Network, the service that allows PlayStation 3 owners to play games online and access the PlayStation Store, has been down for several weeks now after another intrusion forced Sony to completely rebuild its servers and their security layers.
Details are still scarce, but Sony has confirmed that PSN user data was compromised. With over 77 million registered PSN accounts, you can imagine how much personal info might have been snatched. Sony also revealed that its servers were running outdated software, and that there was no firewall in place to deter intruders. Sony has yet to confirm if PSN financial data (credit card info) was compromised, but they did confirm that financial data tied to nearly 24 million SOE accounts was likely compromised.
With over 100 million affected accounts/users, the Sony debacle is one of the biggest examples of personal data theft ever. Sony's not the only company to screw the pooch when it comes to protecting its customers, however. We decided to take a trip down memory lane and look at some other massive data leaks/breaches, involving companies like Gawker Media, TJX and Epsilon. Even government agencies like the Department of Veteran Affairs have had catastrophic security breaches...the hackers of the world spare no one! Of course, it should be said that some of these data leaks weren't even caused by hackers, but were instead the result of careless employees who don't take the protection of consumers (or citizens) private information very seriously.
I like the article however you appear to be missing the potentially scarier breach that happenned to RSA on March 18th 2011. Customer data was not stolen but information regarding the SecureID system used by thousands of comanies may have been obtained.
I like the article however you appear to be missing the potentially scarier breach that happenned to RSA on March 18th 2011. Customer data was not stolen but information regarding the SecureID system used by thousands of comanies may have been obtained.
Thanks for reading! We wanted to cap this article at ten examples so we left out the RSA breach, as well as a few dozen other companies/entities.
-Devin Connors
excellent article. very informative! and very interesting!
Good article, it shows that no company or government agency is immune from data breach.
Texas pension system had a big breach this spring, exposing sensitive information, including SSNs, of ~3.5M Texas state employees: http://www.txsafeguard.org/ .
Some of that data was left unencrypted on the server for over 1 year!
The post-handling of the issue is also somewhat questionable (from the point of view of the end-user, err. victim).
There is an interesting discussion on that here: http://door64.com/blog/n/30938
Gawker Media was the best. That made me so, so happy back then. Gizmodo and Kotaku writers made me hate that company like I've never hated a company before.
Good article, it shows that no company or government agency is immune from data breach.
Thank God American electronic voting machines are immune to fraud.
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