Feldon From SignOnSanDiego.com, the website of the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper.
Customers of San Diego-based Sony Online Entertainment must watch out for “spear phishing” scams after a hacker may have gained access to personal information on 24.6 million accounts, including email addresses and passwords.
Privacy experts say cyber criminals could have enough information to send highly customized emails or postal letters — or make phone calls — that will appear to come from Sony in hopes of tricking customers into revealing more sensitive information — such as credit card or Social Security numbers.
Sony Online Entertainment urged its customers to be “especially aware” of these scams. “Sony will not contact you in any way, including email, asking for your credit card number, Social Security number or other personal information,” the company said in a letter to customers posted on its Web site. “If you are asked for this information, you can be confident Sony is not the entity asking.”
Sony Online Entertainment, which makes video games such as the EverQuest series that users play online, abruptly shut down its network on Monday after the breach was discovered. The breach did not expose customer credit card numbers in the U.S. But it did possibly reveal names, addresses, email, birth dates, gender, phone numbers, login names and passwords.
The PlayStation network breach came from an attack on a data center in San Diego. Taina Rodriguez, a Sony Online Entertainment spokeswoman, declined to say if PlayStation and Sony Online Entertainment shared the same data center.
“Our servers are different from the PSN servers,” she said. “We are operated separately. But since we’re both under the Sony umbrella, there is a degree of architecture that overlaps.”
Rodriguez added that Sony Online Entertainment’s network would be shut down until Friday and possibly longer. The company has contacted the FBI to investigate the attack.
I’d rather have the servers down for another week and knowing that they fixed all security breaches they could find (and even breaches they couldn’t find) than have the servers back up too quickly and not be sure that my personnal data are safe
Well if this is the case then why are they stringing folks along on their facebook site, by saying were working hard and the servers will be up very soon.
Friday is “very soon” when you consider the amount of data they have to sort through. Millions upon millions of records of current and past accounts have to be gone over with a fine toothed comb, then they have to fix the security problem. Not to mention jumping through the hoops with the FBI. Let’s all give them a little slack, go fishing or something this week and cross your fingers that it will be up this weekend(And enjoy our free month!).
it will be a Friday when the servers come back up,not just this Friday it seems far too soon for it to happen i’d sooner they’d get it right now than have the same thing happen a couple of years down the line.
Very soon…Friday or later isnt very soon when the statement is giving tues evening and considering the fact that the servers have never been down for more than hours…
If Friday is indeed the earliest then that communciation was pretty misleading.
This whole thing is BS and im curious to know if Sony did this to itself. It’s getting a little rediculous if they breached the PSN a week – a week and a half before SoE went down leads me to think they where hacked twice or using this as an excuse. Im just saying its fishy all around and a month of free game and (probably going to happen) another double xp day or weekend (Which a lot of people probably wont be around to use) is not enough, considering i’ve gotten 4 strange calls concerning personal information from east indian people (yes they are the only nationality that has given me these odd calls) and its really starting to piss me off. I should not have to go through phone calls and messages on behalf of Sony, yes it is Sony’s fault and we are paying for it, so I ask you is 1 month really enough? what if some how someone does get a hold of your information and goes nuts with it? 1 month of free gameplay gonna cover that? Hmm I don’t think so.
Unforchantly with the FBI involved the servers will probably not be back up online until a few days after the FBI state that they are all don with there investigations.
Well it looks like it is time for everyone to discover a new game. I hear RL is quite exciting.
30 Days free play – lol. 30 Days double xp !!!
even 10 years ago they was way more … online… the longest down i have saw on everquest was like 24h (every two day for a long time) but was still able to play !
Dont care about security breach… there always security breach for someone who really want to. Even pentagone is hacked. Just do the investigation and find the guy and let us play damned !
People who dont care are not online h24 for sure :p
Really … ho god they got hacked ? and what ? everything is hacked you didnt know ? :p
you want them to bring the servers back online without a full investigation into the matter. but you would most likely be the first one doing a /petition sayin that yer missing this or that from your account or that your account plain got hacked. then turn around and complain that SOE didnt take the situation seriously enough. Im sure SOE knows what its losses will be like. Im pretty sure if they could avoid the loss they are taking they would have found an alternative to bringing the servers down. By bringing the servers down and keeping them down while informing customers of the situation is gonna save SOE from much more losses than if they kept the servers up waiting to hear from lawyers of clients such as yourself trying to sue for a hacked account. Stop whinning and let them do what needs to be done. the only obligation of SOE is to simply inform customers of the situation and downtime, which they have done. Simply wait it out like the rest of us. If you knew better than SOE on the situation then you probly wouldnt be sitting in your chair playin a game 24/7.
One thing that just dawned on me is that probably most CSR’s might be on an hourly wage. That would mean the longer it takes the longer those guys are probably out of work with no pay. Weather is nice in San Diego but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to pay rent.