By Cody Heintz, Assistant Business Manager
For those who have a Playstation 3 and are on Playsation Network (PSN) your information might be sold to the highest bidder. The attack on Sony’s database has left the 77 million users of PSN at risk of having their identity stolen, which is far greater than the 1.25 million accounts that were hacked from gawker in December of 2010. The attack was able to shut down all of PSN service, which was originally just a nuisance for those, that Netflix or PS Plus on their PS3’s but it only recently that it was found out about the security breach. The worst part about this is that Sony had remained silent for about week after the attack and has posed even greater harm for their customers.
As a PS3 owner and occasional user of PSN the first thing I did when I found out about this was to check my credit card and see if there was any weird transactions in the last couple of days. But I had to find this out through news outlets instead of receiving an official notice from Sony Computer Entertainment. Sony’s silence for six days has put their users in even much more danger. If Sony alerted the media and their consumer base earlier there would be less of chance that their information could be stolen as it would mean people would be able to cancel their credit cards earlier and look for any suspicious activity on their credit cards. Also, Sony taking their time with putting information out there is leading to stress for the many PSN users in the world.
The fact that Sony’s database could be hacked so easily shows a major problem with Sony in that they get anal-retentive over protecting their data but could care less about their users data. Sony spent a lot of money and time developing DRM and copy right protection for Blu-Rays, instead of putting their users in a more secure place than just a plain-text file. Hopefully, Sony will learn a lesson and learn how to better ways to keep their customers data private such as not keeping them all in the same place.
However, since the damage has already been done, Sony’s main priority besides finding the hacker and securing their databases should be to save face and avoid getting sued into bankruptcy. As a happy PS3 user I hope that this does not prevent Sony from releasing a PS4
