Play Station Hackers steal Sony's Reputation and raised questions about safety of online transactions

Sony has confirmed that the personal information of 70 million PlayStation Network members may have been stolen by hackers.

The stolen information include their name, home address, date of birth and credit card number with Expiry Date details.



Sony blog has below information.

We have discovered that between April 17 and April 19, 2011, certain PlayStation Network and Qriocity service user account information was compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into our network

Sony has not released any technical details of how the PlayStation Network was breached.


And, Sony had admitted  this personal information theft only  six days after  the Network was taken down.

This delayed response from Sony have created a negative impression on Sony. And, Sony is trying to give below explanation for its delay in admitting the hacking.

There’s a difference in timing between when we identified there was an intrusion and when we learned of consumers’ data being compromised. We learned there was an intrusion April 19th and subsequently shut the services down. We then brought in outside experts to help us learn how the intrusion occurred and to conduct an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the incident. It was necessary to conduct several days of forensic analysis, and it took our experts until yesterday to understand the scope of the breach. We then shared that information with our consumers and announced it publicly this afternoon.

And, Sony has published FAQ page for giving answers for the common questions about this hacking and play station shutdown.


This hacking affects many people in various ways.

Sony PlayStation was shut-down for many days, So Customers are losing money as they were not able to use the PlayStation for the payment they made. There is a online petition going on for asking Sony to do free credit for compensating hack.

Developers who have games available for download are counting the cost of lost sales.

Someone who uses the same username, password and credit details across sites could find themselves seriously compromised.

The affected People can ask their Credit card company to cancel their existing credit card and can ask them to issue a new one. But still they may face many problems, as the hackers can use their email address for collecting information about their other website uses by sending phishing emails..

Sony's failure to handle this hacking problem effectively,  affects the reputation of the Sony especially it will affect the sales of Sony Tablets

And, this attack has raised questions about safety of online transactions.

Wall Street Journal has written as,

The hackers who have penetrated Sony Corp.'s online PlayStation videogame service and possibly collected credit-card data from millions of users delivered a blow to the company's long-pursued but elusive goal of linking its consumer electronic devices to an online network of movies, music and videogames.

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