Sony Breaks Silence on PSN Outage, It’s Not Pretty

After days without word on the status of the PlayStation Network, Sony has broken their silence regarding the network outage.  The good news, if you want to call it that, is that PSN may be up and running again shortly.  In a mass email to all PSN account holders Sony explained the nature of the prolonged downtime.  More important than being able to hop on and play some SOCOM with your friends, is the fact that every facet of your personal life may have been divulged in the attack.

The “external intrusion” of the PSN included a “compromise of personal information”.  Here’s what hackers got away with in the attack:  Your name, address, country, email address, birthdate, PSN login and password.  Since many people probably use the same passwords for numerous accounts across the web, hackers could have hit a goldmine of free access to many personal accounts.  If you are one of these creatures of habit, now would be your que to leave this page and start changing your logins for your vital accounts if they used the same logins as your PSN account(s).

The email also details that it’s still unclear if profile data, which would include billing information and CREDIT CARD INFORMATION could have been compromised.  Sony cautions users to change passwords once the network has been restored, and you should probably also check your credit card statements for unauthorized purchases, as well as credit reports for potential unknown accounts that may have been newly created with your information obtained on the network.

This announcement from Sony goes against what operators have been telling consumers that have called in to verify if their privacy has been breached, this won’t end well for Sony as it opens the corporation up to lawsuits where they could be held liable for negligence in failing to inform consumers of the level that which their “secure” network had been compromised.

In a small side note, PSN may be up and running within a week.  It looks like we all just got one more thing to do while PSN is down, combat identity theft…yay!