Sony admits utter PSN failure: your personal data has been stolen

[Miss Chicken]

No, I am quite willing to base my information on all sources and listen to what people explain.

However I still think as soon as there is a breach of security the wise thing to do is to admit to a breach straight away rather than pass it off as just maintenance. From the first day that they knew that there had been a breach, they could have admitted it saying they as yet had no idea about the extent of the breach. They did call in outside security experts for a reason, didn't they? What is wrong with letting their customers know that the problems the PSN was having seemed serious enough to warrant calling in security experts?

 

[Servo]

No, I am quite willing to base my information on all sources and listen to what people explain.

However I still think as soon as there is a breach of security the wise thing to do is to admit to a breach straight away rather than pass it off as just maintenance. From the first day that they knew that there had been a breach, they could have admitted it saying they as yet had no idea about the extent of the breach. They did call in outside security experts for a reason, didn't they? What is wrong with letting their customers know that the problems the PSN was having seemed serious enough to warrant calling in security experts?

I still don't know where you're getting your information from. It was common knowledge that there had been a hack from the start. I was taking part in a discussion about it on the Playstation Universe forums on April 19th. The "PSN is undergoing maintenance" message was put up 2 days after the hack, when PSN was undergoing maintenance to rectify the problem.

 

[Miss Chicken]

It wasn't common knowledge to anyone who might not visit forums etc or to people who only use their Playstations occasionally.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Actually, I agree. I don't think it was ever common knowledge that they had been hacked until Sony announced what had happened. Until then, it was all speculation as to what had gone on. When it was down for more than 2 days, that's when people started to feel that it was bigger than just a regular maintenance. To the general public, anyone trying to log in would just get that maintenance message which doesn't tell you very much about what's going on.

 

[Servo]

Ok, but the point still stands that they didn't say it was maintenance until it actually was maintenance. For the first 2 days, people were just getting an error code when they tried to log in.

What would have been the point in them rushing to tell people they'd been hacked straight away when they had no idea of the scope of the hack? If they'd done that, the first thing that would have happened is they'd have been bombarded with questions about what happened, who did it, what the damage was...etc, questions that they had no answers to at the time. Then everyone would have been banging on about how incompetent they are for not being able to answer those questions properly. Better for them to wait until they had some idea of what they were dealing with first.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Right, exactly. I'm not debating about the wait itself. They could only have posted what they did when they had collected the necessary information. At the very least though, they could have pointed people towards the website where it was being updated, giving the average person a clue that it was beyond a simple maintainance. Otherwise the average person didn't know what was going on and didn't have a clue of anything beyond maintenance.