Sony claims PSN attack is a hoax not a hack
Anonymous bosh
Sony has denied claims allegedly made by Anonymous that the hactivist group breached the PlayStation Network and stole over 10m account details, despite nearly 3000 credentials being posted online as apparent proof.
One alleged member of Anonymous claims to have stolen a 50GB database containing millions of users' details, posting a list of PSN emails online in a bid to prove his authenticity.
The list was immediately denounced by some Sony watchers as a cut and paste job, taking names from an unrelated email list posted in March. And Sony has now said its own investigation shows the hack is a hoax.
"We've confirmed that the recent claim that PlayStation Network was illegally hacked and that customer passwords and email addresses were accessed is completely false," said a Sony representative in a statement.
Roughly 77m PSN accounts were hacked in 2011 and while these 'Anonymous' claims appear to have been debunked, there's no harm in changing your password - again - just to be on the safe side. ®
COMMENTS
Re: Who do you believe?
PSN wasn't brought down by a hack, Sony took it offline while they investigated what happened. I look at it as a sign that Sony were serious about fixing the weaknesses despite the growing furore in the media. A weaker company might have bowed to pressure and put access back up before completing their security review.
Re: Who do you believe?
Fanboy alert.
I know it's hard, but try and stay away from fanboyism. when you have been potentially hacked, you have to:
1/ take the servers down.
2/ forensically image what you have.
3/ analyze what m,ay have been taken and always air on the cautious side, take a worst case scenario
4/ if you can't be 100% sure something wasn't taken, then you have to assume it was.
However the media totally raped Sony for doing the right thing, and coming 100% clean and honest and worst case, so magically "creditcards may have been accessed" suddenly was reported as "creditcards were stolen"...
Sony did 100% the right thing, and whilst it meant you couldn't play you games, they were going through the painfully meticulous process of following the rules, the desperate media used it as an example to cash in on sensationalist and irresponsible scaremongering reporting.
I think Sony is right
I own a PS3 (and I'm very happy with it) and also a PSN account. Because of that I searched and grabbed the data which was shared the first time to see if I could find my credentials in there. I didn't keep the data but the one odd thing I recall is that it had a password & e-mail address and nothing more. Therefore I was quite sure the data was falsified back then.
Now I don't recall every detail of that first released batch but I do think its very weird that this batch follows the exact same style: password followed by an e-mail address. Even though the header claims to provide "user name, password, e-mail address".
Quite frankly I'm still convinced they never released real data the first time, but it seems to me as if this batch is the exact same batch they released back then. So I can well imagine that Sony waves this away as being a fake claim.
Re: Clownshoesnonymous
Xbox Live HAS been hacked. Accounts emptying has been going on for over a year now.
http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2012/02/26/xbox-live-accounts-still-being-hacked/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-01-06-a-january-account-of-xbox-live-hacking-and-fraud
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/Xbox/8906043/Xbox-Live-customers-hacked-in-fresh-cyber-fraud-case.html
The only difference is Microsoft are sweeping the problem under the carpet, and ensuring the American press don't say anything bad about the American console, as it keeps Americans in jobs.....
Very dissapointed
Last time PSN was hacked I got some cool free games afterwards. This time, no free games.
Standards of hacktivism seem to be falling off these days, when I were a lad you could start world war 3 with your telephone and a TV/Typewriter combo........
