You Will Tell Your Grandchildren
If you don't own a PlayStation 3 and haven't been paying attention to the news, then you might not have been aware of the gigantic problem that Sony has on their plate. If you're one of those people, then let explain what's going on with Sony. A while back, the hacker George "Geohot" Hotz leaked the PlayStation 3's root key onto the internet which allowed other hackers to basically do whatever they wanted with their PS3s. Well Sony didn't like that, so they hired some lawyers, got a hold of the IP addresses of everyone that visited Hotz's website with the root key, and did updates on the PS3 to prevent hacking. Well hackers didn't like that, so they rallied together behind the infamous hacker group, Anonymous to attack the PlayStation Network. These attacks were in protest to Sony, and didn't mean any harm to PSN users, but something horrible was spun from that.
An unknown group of hackers hacked into PSN and reportedly began stealing personal user information from the databases. Among the things stolen were credit card information, which is identity theft, and is extremely illegal. Now there are around 77 million accounts registered on PSN, which is a number large enough to attract the attention of Homeland Security. And when Homeland Security gets involved, you know its a big deal. These guys fight terrorists for Pete's sake! If you ask me, there must have been someone there that wasn't doing their job. With a network as big as PSN, one would think that they would put some extra security measures into the system to prevent a fiasco like this. I don't know for sure if someone was slacking off or these hackers are just really good at what they do, but rumors and reports have been going around saying that there were major holes in the system.
But let's not forget, Sony is still the victim in all of this even thought they might have brought this onto themselves. These hackers deserve the most blame and should be put in jail, because, well, identity theft is bad. There are reports saying that fraudulent charges have been appearing on PSN users' credit cards. There really isn't any way of tracing those charges back to the hackers, but the timing of it all is mighty suspicious. It's clear that these attacks are not in protest, so Anonymous shouldn't be blamed.
Whatever the reason is, it isn't helping anyone. PSN has been offline since mid-April, Sony could lose billions due to lawsuits, and the reputation for video games as a whole get knocked back even more. Whatever the outcome of this is, hopefully it doesn't ruin Sony or any users' lives.
What do you think of this whole situation? Let me know in the comments. Also, here is a handy website to let you know if PSN is back up.
No comments:
Post a Comment