NOTE: The following is the text of the technology news summary from the Sunday, May 8th It's Komplicated webcast.
The biggest news of the week had everybody talking about Sony. Why? Well, first the Playstation Network (PSN) and 77 million accounts went down like a Clinton-era White House intern all the way back in the tail end of April and still is causing challenges for some users. Messin' up the SOCOM, pal!
Literally adding insult to injury, games like DC Universe Online were taken down Monday the 3rd because a *second* hack which upped the number to — hold on to your turbo shock controllers — Wired noted that 24.6 million users worth of personal information (say hello to identity theft) and more than 20,000 credit card and bank account numbers are all out there in the digital ether. Sony said that the compromised personal information includes customers’ names, addresses, e-mail addresses, birth dates, gender, phone numbers, logins and hashed passwords. Oh, and the hack happened April 16th or 17th due to it being an "outdated database from 2007."
Outdated? What? Yeah, Gamepro reported that Sony got called in front of congress to explain why they suck so intensely. Dr. Gene Spafford of Purdue University said that Sony had been using outdated software on its servers for months, and that nothing had been done about it. Spafford claimed that security experts had spotted Sony was using outdated versions of the Apache Web server software and had no firewall installed. The issue was apparently "reported in an open forum monitored by Sony employees" some two to three months before the recent breaches.
So a) you can't play the games you enjoy and b) all kinds of your business is all out in the streets.
Sony believes that hacking group Anonymous is responsible for this, and they told the US House of Representatives that a file named "Anonymous" had the words "We are legion" left behind in the the files. These phrases, of course, are calling cards for the hacking group, who've already sworn vengeance against Sony for their legal attack on hacker GeoHot, who figured out how to root a PS3 and make it do anything, then posted that info online and let it loose in the world.
Sony's discussing reimbursing credit card replacement charges in light of the data breach after CEO Kazuo Hirai apologized to customers. Did we mention Sony took six days to even publicly admit the hack had happened? Good times.
Sources for this story:
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