Tech Thursday – Sony’s PSN Hacked: Customer Data In The Wild!

This has not been a good year so far for Sony. First their main encryption key for the PS3 was broken and then the data on how to do it was released on the Internet. Now Sony has announced that their PlayStation Network, has been hacked and customer's personal info may have been stolen.

If you are one of the 70+ million users with a PlayStation account, Sony's pretty sure that your Name, Address, Birthday, username and password, country and email, are pretty much in the hands of some "leet" hackers. They also say your purchase history was possibly taken too. Sony was quick to blame the Hacktivist group Anonymous, but they have said they weren't behind this.

Sony has been getting a lot of static about how long it took them to reveal the hack that took place sometime between April 17th and April 19th. Sony defended themselves by explaining that before they could come out and say anything, they needed a few days of forensic study to confirm what they thought was going on. In the world of Tech PR, you're dammed if you do and dammed if you don't.

As of this morning, the PlayStation Network is still not back, and there is no word on when it will be back. And now the backlash is now starting to hit home as lawsuits are being filed and Sony's stock has taken a hit.

If you're one of the PSN users affected, some basic precautions you can take are to reset your passwords on sites you may be using your same PSN password on. It's not a smart idea to res-use passwords on multiple sites for this kind of reason, but I know there are a ton of guilty people out there that do this. I am one of them, though I don't have a PSN account.

Sony has also provided some resources to help protect you from Identity Theft. The big one being the Federal Trade Commission's website with info on what you can do. They also suggest reporting anything that looks like you may have had your identity stolen to the Attorney General's office.

A couple questions I have is, has this put you off from buy Sony products now? Were you affected by this?

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