Sony has finally come out and provided more information and this is the worst news for all those who participate in the PlayStation Network. It seems that user information may have been exposed and taken for up to 77 million users on their network. It gets even worse where the credit card information, credit card purchase history and the credit card billing address information may have been exposed and taken as well. As you can imagine, this has caused many to be outraged at the actions of Sony with regards to this exposure, but even worse that it took this long for them to provide information.
Many are reporting on this, including Business Insider and it looks like Sony completely mishandled this whole situation. Here is what is known as of this evening.
April 19th – Sony’s PlayStation Network was found to have been breached
April 20th – Sony shuts down the PlayStation Network
Sony brings in outside security company to determine scope of the breach
Outside security company begins to find that personal information was taken
April 25th – Sony is informed as to the scope of the breach and begins to notify users
April 26th – Sony makes a public statement on their blog
According to the update information sent to clients which you can read here, the general personal information was taken, including email addresses and birth dates. The PSN logon and password information, including the online ID’s has been compromised. They are recommending that people contact the three credit bureaus and report the possible theft of the credit card information.
All of this is very disturbing and makes things even worse because they waited until the report came from the security company with the full scope of the problem. They knew that there was a possibility that personal information was possibly taken and chose not to issue an alert. They had to know that credit card information was possibly taken and chose not to issue an alert. They had to know that before the weekend and did not alert any users so that they could taken preventative actions to alert their credit card companies or even cancel their credit cards so that fraudulent charges could not be make.
This has turned into a huge public relations nightmare for Sony and the management of the company is to blame for the failure to first look out for the interests of their clients. They now have 77 million angry users who could have taken action days ago to protect themselves. Expect to see the US Congress try and get involved in this one and hold hearings.
