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River_Rat_459
10-12-2011, 08:47
This was e-mailed to subscribers to the official Playstation blog. I'm posting in Scuttlebutt since it has a lot of visibility.


An Important Message From Sony’s Chief Information Security Officer

Posted: 11 Oct 2011 07:09 PM PDT

We want to let you know that we have detected attempts on Sony Entertainment Network, PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment (“Networks”) services to test a massive set of sign-in IDs and passwords against our network database. These attempts appear to include a large amount of data obtained from one or more compromised lists from other companies, sites or other sources. In this case, given that the data tested against our network consisted of sign-in ID-password pairs, and that the overwhelming majority of the pairs resulted in failed matching attempts, it is likely the data came from another source and not from our Networks. We have taken steps to mitigate the activity.

Less than one tenth of one percent (0.1%) of our PSN, SEN and SOE audience may have been affected. There were approximately 93,000 accounts globally (PSN/SEN: approximately 60,000 accounts; SOE: approximately 33,000) where the attempts succeeded in verifying those accounts’ valid sign-in IDs and passwords, and we have temporarily locked these accounts. Only a small fraction of these 93,000 accounts showed additional activity prior to being locked. We are currently reviewing those accounts for unauthorized access, and will provide more updates as we have them. Please note, if you have a credit card associated with your account, your credit card number is not at risk. We will work with any users whom we confirm have had unauthorized purchases made to restore amounts in the PSN/SEN or SOE wallet.

As a preventative measure, we are requiring secure password resets for those PSN/SEN accounts that had both a sign-in ID and password match through this attempt. If you are in the small group of PSN/SEN users who may have been affected, you will receive an email from us at the address associated with your account that will prompt you to reset your password.

Similarly, the SOE accounts that were matched have been temporarily turned off. If you are among the small group of affected SOE customers, you will receive an email from us at the address associated with your account that will advise you on next steps in order to validate your account credentials and have your account turned back on.

We want to take this opportunity to remind our consumers about the increasingly common threat of fraudulent activity online, as well as the importance of having a strong password and having a username/password combination that is not associated with other online services or sites. We encourage you to choose unique, hard-to-guess passwords and always look for unusual activity in your account.

MaximusR3
10-12-2011, 09:38
I am a PS blog subscriber and did not receive an email because they only sent it to accounts the may have been affected. The news sites are putting up a lot of misleading headlines again because they're excited to think they have some real news again

basically the situation is nothing to do with PSN or hacking or stolen PSN account info. what they did is got a hold of email/password info from some other site (i.e. gmail) and tried using that to sign into PSN, hoping for people to be using the same email/password across multiple sites/services.

so basically, the only people that need to be concerned about this are those who use the same email and password for everything, because chances are PSN isn't the only thing they tried to log into, even though Sony is the only one reporting it

ASignorelli
10-12-2011, 11:08
This was e-mailed to subscribers to the official Playstation blog. I'm posting in Scuttlebutt since it has a lot of visibility.

If anything, it's showing that PSN has got this on lockdown, and they're doing their job. I actually feel more secure now than before.