Sony's Playstation Network hacked. Down 6 days and counting. And to ice the cake...

[loinburger]

It's not just that they were breached, but that their security is so awful that it required a complete rebuild rather than simply a change in keys. It also takes a special kind of stupid to store passwords in plaintext.

And contrary to what you've learned from Hollywood, not every security system can be defeated by college kids.

[Dinner]

I'll take your word for it since I have no real idea of the technical challenges. I do agree storing passwords in plain text is retarded though since that is obvious even to someone with no technical background.

[MikeH]

And Nintendo don't take that kind of information anyway.

And "they publicly tried to piss off the hackers" is a gross distortion of a very complex situation including lots of stakeholders.

So other than pretty much every point, your summary of the situation was great Oerdin.

[loinburger]

An AES-256 key would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to crack by guessing (even with a thousand supercomputers helping you), so if the passwords were encrypted they'd be useless to the hackers - Sony could just change their encryption keys and be up and running in no time. I'm not saying they'd be absolutely secure, but they'd be absolutely secure from college kids - they'd be vulnerable to corporate or government attackers who could pay somebody a ****load of money to steal the keys to the kingdom.

[Dinner]

And Nintendo don't take that kind of information anyway.

And "they publicly tried to piss off the hackers" is a gross distortion of a very complex situation including lots of stakeholders.

So other than pretty much every point, your summary of the situation was great Oerdin.

Thank you, thank you. Never go out on a limb when you can just mutter something obvious.