The Sony Playstation Network hack that has plagued the video game platform since April 20 has forced the company to shutdown the service indefinitely while it works to rebuild the platform.
The Playstation blog, a space normally used for gaming updates, tips and anecdotes, has been updating the status of the network about once a day since the initial attack brought down the platform last week. It said April 25 that the company does not have a timeframe for when the service will again be available.
“I know you are waiting for additional information on when PlayStation Network and Qriocity services will be online. Unfortunately, I don’t have an update or timeframe to share at this point in time,” wrote Patrick Seybold, senior director for communications and social media at Playstation.
The company acknowledged the hack April 22 in a post stating that an “external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services. In order to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward, we turned off PlayStation Network & Qriocity services on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th.”
Seybold wrote that the Playstation Network is “re-building our system to further strengthen our network infrastructure.” That suggest that the intrusion is not a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack but a more sophisticated hook into the system.
International hacker group Anonymous, which has taken down websites large and small with DDoS attacks according to its political agenda, has denied responsibility for the attack. In a post on its message boards, Anonymous said “for once we didn’t do it.”
Note: Unedited from the original Anonymous message, typos and all.
Sony’s Playstation Network, its online service for Playstation 3 and its Playstation Portable consoles, suffered from a major outage today; which is on going as of this writting. According to Son’ys blog, the interruption in service may last into the long weekend – for at least another “full day or two”. Sony released a statement through its EU blog, saying that the network outage may be a result of “targeted behaviour by an outside party”, brining in the possibility of cyberattacks. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the message has since been removed.
While it could be the case that other Anons have acted by themselves AnonOps wa not related to this incident and takes no responsiblity for it. A more likely explination is that Sony is taking advantage of Anonymous’ previous ill-will towards the company to distract users from the fact the outage is accutally an internal problem with the companies servers.
Sony is incompetent.
Anonymous had originally been upset with Sony over its decision to sue hacker George Hotz after he jailbroke the Playstation 3. Sony and Hotz settled the case earlier this month.
The Playstation Network has upwards of 70 million members and has been around since 2006. It allows users to play multi-player games online, rent videos and games, watch Netflix movies, instant message and chat.
Correction: Qriocity is an online European music service, not the European version of PSN as previously reported.
