In an Effort to Protect Itself, Sony Fails to Guard its Customers

I don’t have too terribly much to add other than to reiterate what a true catastrophe this really is, and why Sony has no one to blame but themselves.

First, there’s the war with Anonymous, which started over the absolutely ridiculous issue of Sony taking away OtherOS functionality which allowed users to install their own operating system like Linux on their system. Unfortunately, the kind of people who are talented enough to install Linux on their Playstation are the sort that have the power to hack their way through Sony’s security with relative ease. The company started a war against a few specific hackers, namely one George “GeoHot” Hotz, which drew the ire of a thousand of his brethren over at the loose hacking collective of Anonymous.

Soon their attacks brought the PSN down, but they officially called off the war due to the fact that it appeared they were hurting consumers more than the corporation. But what appears to have happened is a few rogue agents stayed in the system and managed to hack their way to 77 million PSN members personal information, including birthdays, addresses, emails, phone numbers and possibly credit cards. The PSN has been offline since, and Sony is just now telling customers, five days later, that this information had been compromised.

I do not condone the actions of these hackers in any form, but Sony absolutely kicked a hornets nest that should have been left well enough alone. All of this started over OtherOS? Seriously? I bet they wish they had just let that one go at this point.

And perhaps the more important issue at hand is how lax Sony’s security is that this was even possible. This kind of info should be stored at the highest level of encryption possible, which is absolutely was not, and while Sony has been focused on making sure their movies can’t be bootlegged and their games can’t be pirated, they forgot to protect their millions of consumers who trust them with their personal information.

How bad is this going to get? I’m not sure, but when a company as huge as Sony issues a statement telling you to watch out for email and phone scams, and keep an eye on your credit card bill, that’s a PR disaster which is going to be hard to crawl back from. But if Microsoft can survive a practically 100% console failure rate on the original Xbox 360 with the Red Ring of Death, I’m sure Sony will dig itself out of this hole eventually, hopefully with a few lessons learned.