Rumor: PSN Fell to CFW that Caused "Extreme Piracy"
Sony has simply blamed the ongoing PSN outage on an “external intrusion” without going into the exact cause and nature of this unrelenting crisis - equal parts technical disaster and public relations fiasco. According to a Redditor named chesh420, who only identified himself as a PSX-Scene.com moderator, the current PSN outage could be the result of a new custom firmware (CFW) named Rebug that “essentially turns a retail console into a dev console (not fully, but gives you a lot of the same options that usually dev's only have access to).”
Soon after its launch on March 31, 2011, CFW users began using Rebug to get their hacked consoles back onto PSN. But the real problem began when some people discovered that Rebug also enabled them to download PSN content using fake credit card information. Apparently, Sony did not feel the need of authenticating credit card information sent over its private developer network.
“What happened next was extreme piracy of PSN content. Sony realizing the issue here shut down the network.,” wrote chesh420 in a post on Reddit. However, he later reminded everyone to take his explanation of the outage with a grain of salt as, no matter how reasonable, “this is all speculation and information gathered from various devs in the PS3 scene.”
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Red Ensign
April 26, 2011 at 7:33pm
Just got an email from Sony pretty much confirming this. Looks legit but you never know. It's to my email I used with Sony and I never use it for much else. I've never gotten a phishing attempt to this email so I'll assume it's real for now. There's much more to the email but posting it all sets off the spam filter here.
Valued PlayStation(R)Network/Qriocity Customer: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. In response to this
intrusion, we have:1) Temporarily turned off PlayStation Network and Qriocity services;
2) Engaged an outside, recognized security firm to conduct a full
and complete investigation into what happened; and3) Quickly taken steps to enhance security and strengthen our
network infrastructure by rebuilding our system to provide you
with greater protection of your personal information.We greatly appreciate your patience, understanding and goodwill
as we do whatever it takes to resolve these issues as quickly and
efficiently as practicable.Although we are still investigating the details of this incident,
we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following
information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country,
email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login,
and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data,
including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip),
and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may
have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your
dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have
been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit
card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have
provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity,
out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit
card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have
been obtained.For your security, we encourage you to be especially aware of email,
telephone and postal mail scams that ask for personal or sensitive
information. Sony will not contact you in any way, including by email,
asking for your credit card number, social security number or other
personally identifiable information. If you are asked for this information,
you can be confident Sony is not the entity asking. When the PlayStation
Network and Qriocity services are fully restored, we strongly recommend that
you log on and change your password. Additionally, if you use your PlayStation
Network or Qriocity user name or password for other unrelated services or
accounts, we strongly recommend that you change them as well.
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Sediket
April 26, 2011 at 6:20pm
Being a gamer and a playstation user who installed linux on my playstation when I first bought it, I think Sony deserves this and I think many other users/gamers feel the same way.
This original feature of being able to install an alternate OS was motivatation for some to buy a playstation and a community was formed around this, then Sony turns around, removes the feature and so harshly attacks the community that had developed.
As a user and gamer of Sony it really puts it into perspective that THIS company really doesn't care for its users/gamers. Although I understand companies don't always have to luxury of trying to make their users/gamers happy as well as turinging a profit, but to so blatently ignore and attack your users/gamers is just asinine.
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Renaissance 2K
April 26, 2011 at 11:01am
Oh, come on, guys. I'm sure they just broke into the development network so they could try out those PSN games before they bought them.
Or, because they don't have any money and wouldn't have bought them anyway.
Or, to make sure they worked on their particular PS3 configuration.
...Right?
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chronium
April 26, 2011 at 10:17am
That really doesn't explain why Sony is rebuilding PSN. I'm more under the impression that a hacker just deleted the playstation network instead of stealing or doing anything else.
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Caboose
April 26, 2011 at 10:40am
I could see them rebuilding the PSN to help block this from happening again/plugging all the holes.
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Danthrax66
April 26, 2011 at 10:34am
No they have to rebuild it because their current architecture for the network won't allow them to implement the security needed to avoid this in the future. There are probably other improvemnts to the PSN they are going to make as well that can possibly speed it up and improve it. Look at it this way hackers have allowed Sony to have a second chance at building an even betgter PSN and Sony is taking advantage of it. Also there is a possibility that they stoll Credit Card info so some of this time is going to be spent trying to trace what the hackers were able to do.
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Eoraptor
April 26, 2011 at 9:23am
Well, if this really is the cause, I'd say it's at least partly of Sony's own making. After all, if they didn't spend so much time and resources trying to knock out every modified PS3 console out there, people wouldn't be driven to more and more extreme hacks just to keep the functions that were originaly built into the darned things. Not that I condone credit card fraud or bad coding, far from it in fact since it plays to the "security concerns" Sony has been trumpeting as legitimate; but I imagine if Sony would just restore some of the functionality like Other OS, it might go a long way towards soothiung both sides.
Or Sony can just eat itself alive trying to stop pirates, and the pirates can destroy the very thing they are fighting so hard to keep. as seems to be the case for both sides right now.
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