Unauthorized Sign-In Attempts on Sony's PlayStation Network
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 13 October 2011, 00:31 IST
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Bangalore: 93,000 users' accounts on Sony's online gaming and entertainment networks were locked after detecting a huge number of unauthorized attempts to increase access to the accounts. Sony said, users with large set of sign-in IDs and password had concise access to 60,000 accouts on the PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network and another 33,000 accounts on Sony Online Entertainment's service servers. Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of PSN, SEN and SOE consumers were affected by the attacked occurred on Monday, stated Sony. Hackers were successful in verifying sign-in IDs and passwords, the Sony confirmed that credit card information was not at risk during attacks. Sony protected the accounts after confirming the attempts were unauthorized. Philip Reitinger, Sony Chief Information Security Officer, said on the PlayStation blog, "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." Sony said that the compromised accounts also showed "added activity" preceded being locked. But, the information is not detailed and they continue to investigate the unauthorized activity on any of these accounts. Reitinger rather implicit at what the "additional activity" could be,"We will work with any users whom we confirm have had unauthorized purchases made to restore amounts in the PSN/SEN or SOE wallet." Sony is vigorously sending e-mails to affected consumers who have locked accounts and is require performing a secure password reset. PSN hacking is a receptive subject for many, subsequently a month of outages previously this year that were eventually pegged to cyber attacks. The utter scope of the current hacking scandal, which compromised the personal information of millions of gamers, was a massive stain on the public insight of the gaming network. In the damage-control department, Sony issued numerous apologies and the guarantee of a strengthened network, next to giving affected users a $1 million individuality theft insurance policy and free games. It also gave all PSN members affected by the outage access to PlayStation Plus for a month.