It was short before Easter ’11 when apporx. 77 million playstation network users were confronted with a nasty, nonsensing, nothing indicating error message on trying to login to PSN.
First, I had the bad feeling of me doing something wrong on my personal PS3 since I had to recover from a shitty Borderlands bug which ended up in restoring my favourite save games from the backup which I had to do when upgrading my HDD a few months ago.
So I was really pissed about Gearbox (the game studio) and Sony in particular. After the some while I noticed different blog postings around the world where people had similar issues. That satisfied my doubts about a OSI layer 8 problem. What the hell did those loser fuck up again at Sony – I thought. I need to admit, I’m one of those hundreds of users, who’ve been convinced to spend my bucks for a PS3 also because of the other OS feature – which I never used anyway. And yes, I’m also on the latest firmware shit, as I love to play that nice, previously mentioned game with my pals.
Since today we all know what Sony refused until now to admit: They had been hacked. Ha! What a shame. Lovely. They bring out useless firmware updates on monthly basis, in most cases referring to security enhancements without any added value to the PS3 owners. And now, they have been hacked. Ha, again. Apparently all 77 millions accounts, including their location info, birth date and credit card information have been compromised. The greatest hack ever! At least from which we know…
What I did not mentioned so far: I love the concept of what I call „natural paranoia“. I never ever use my real data for logins unless it is absolutely required to use the service. And even then I’m likely not to participate. I also do not own a Facebook account, I prefer talking to my pals face2face. Now, worst case what those Russian script kiddies might have is one of my various alter egos. A fancy sounding username, a freemailer email address, Donald Duck’s address and Queen Elizabeth birthday (ow, yeah, I am older than 18). Of course I did not provide any credit card info to Sony, use PSN cards or prepaid cards instead. They are anonymous as long as you pay cash.
My only concern is the PSN still not working, so no online Borderlands until Sony cleans their house of all that mess.
Hope this encourages affected users to think a bit more about privacy. There is no company in the world able to seriously guarantee this to you. Thrust no one, think critically, question everything before you fell a decision.
PS: And don’t hesitate to check the whois – it’s not the person writing this blog entry 😉