Sony: All personal data stolen from PSN • Hacker News Board

Re: Sony: All personal data stolen from PSN

#181

Post by morganw » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 11:21 PM UTC

hoop wrote: post #149

achompas wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue the cost of the RRoD was a heck of a lot more than $1B because of all the lost sales. People didn't want to invest in hardware that was going to break 5 times over. Agreed. Microsoft only wrote down the $1B as an expected total cost of fixing broken Xboxes. Who knows how much money they lost?

I've been seeing the notion of accounting for the loss of sales due to "reputation" come up on HN recently and I wish to dispute it. First, most of the time when we're talking about business and we talk about costs we're clearly talking about accounting costs. This applies to startups, too. When you're talking about accounting costs, you don't get to include economic costs (e.g., opportunity cost.) Second, isn't tryi…

"Goodwill" is the difference between the book value of a company (value of tangible assets) and what it can be sold for. A manufacturer with tooling, machines and inventory might not have much, but a software company's book value is near zero.

People are asked to put value on intangibles all the time. You might want to write them all down to zero, but the rest of us value Wordsworth more than the dead trees his words are printed on.

Re: Sony: All personal data stolen from PSN

#182

Post by alecco » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 11:27 PM UTC

guelo wrote: post #95

We've seen several examples recently of Japanese corporate culture's secrecy and lack of candor. Toyota, TEPCO nuclear plant and now Sony same pattern of not wanting to admit to the problem. I wouldn't bet on their long term competitiveness.

Let's hold the asian bashing for a moment.

Howard Stringer is Sony emperor... I mean Chairman, President and CEO. And he comes from Sony Entertainment (US) . He was the one pushing stuff like the Audio CD rootkit, DRM everything and BluRay in all PS3 consoles to force a format war. Some people consider this last trick as the move that got the previous admin gutted, I mean restructured, back in 2005. And he got the top job. Amazing guy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Stringer

Re: Sony: All personal data stolen from PSN

#183

Post by TheCondor » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 11:30 PM UTC

lotusleaf1987 wrote: post #10

Thanks for waiting a week to tell me my credit card info has been stolen Sony. I am not a big fan of MSFT usually, but the next time I am buying a console I'm not buying a PS4.

Do what you will, I'm not going to defend Sony exactly but you'd be stunned to know how much this kind of thing happens and goes unreported. Stunned. Sony deserves a pile of credit for manning up and saying what they've said. Unfortunately they're also admitting that they have no idea how bad it really is. A remarkable number of companies wouldn't disclose this much. A remarkable number of them will interpret and spin it all in their favor and report as little as possible.

Buy a Nintendo next time...

Re: Sony: All personal data stolen from PSN

#184

Post by Stormbringer » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 11:32 PM UTC

cryptoz wrote: post #11

I wonder how many times a company can install trojans on your computer, destroy your OS's security, secretly watch all your actions, then proceed to not properly protect your data when you voluntarily give it to them...before going out of business. Sony's size and momentum must be pretty crazy. Or maybe it's our society. I just can't imagine a small record store in the 1960s, after being caught spying through the bed…

I think it's been proven that you can do just about anything in the US and get away with it because the consumers/populace are too placid to do anything about it ... except a BJ from a jewish girl that will get you in serious trouble.

Re: Sony: All personal data stolen from PSN

#185

Post by ansy » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 11:38 PM UTC

wewyor wrote: post #81

ansy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says there is no evidence credit card information was accessed.

It also says it might have been, which is much more worrying to me than the lack of evidence; because before this sony had no evidence that their network was compromised. This whole thing seems like a great example of incompetence.

This compromise happened DAYS ago. Google was hacked by China in mid-December 2009 they didn't publicly announce what happened until January 12, 2010. What started to look like a harmless intrusion turned into compromised gmail accounts turned into a highly sophisticated attack on Chinese dissidents turned into a full scale assault on their infrastructure. People were still figuring out the extent of that attack a couple months later.

While this is a bad security breach, if you follow security news at all you'd know computer security is a joke. The Rustock botnet operated for FIVE years with impunity on as many as 2.4 million rooted machines. People didn't even know they were owned; their computers worked perfectly fine like nothing was wrong. Every system at pwn2own gets owned in seconds and you can bet the black hats were there first. Everyone gets compromised. The only thing stopping a crippling cyber attack is whether someone feels it is beneficial to do so.

I do not especially fault Sony for this. Google gets hacked. Microsoft gets hacked. The NSA gets hacked. The DoD gets hacked. JP Morgan Chase gets hacked. Just add another multi-national to the list. It's a systemic problem that nobody really cares enough about nor can we do much about it if we did care.

EDIT: Just to give you another idea of how screwed we are from a security perspective. To paraphrase George Carlin[1], some programmers are really stupid. Did you ever notice how much stupid software you see? Think of how stupid the average programmer is, and realize half the programmers are stupider than that. And that bottom half? They probably work in IT, managing over engineered address books and accounting ledgers of the world while smarter people worry about cooler problems.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rh6qqsmxNs

Re: Sony: All personal data stolen from PSN

#186

Post by jonknee » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 11:39 PM UTC

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #124

technoweenie wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever entered one of those passwords with a playstation controller?

It doesn't have to use all those funny characters. But the vault at least allows you to use a different password for each site. Which, in this case, might be pretty important.

What password vaults also run on your PS3?

Re: Sony: All personal data stolen from PSN

#187

Post by romland » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 11:45 PM UTC

retroafroman wrote: post #9

rkon wrote: post #6

Payback for GeoHot or what? Haven't heard anything about the source of the attack since the DDoS that Anonymous took credit for...

Anon actually didn't do the DDoS attack. From the press release-"For once we didn't do it" http://anonnews.org/?p=press&a=item&i=848

If I just got my hands on a few million CC's I wouldn't tell my shady "friends" either. Not even for the lulz.

In fact, I'd be peeing my pants if I saw that in the SQL-dump I just downloaded through a couple of proxies.

Re: Sony: All personal data stolen from PSN

#188

Post by yuhong » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 11:45 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #114

guelo wrote: post #95

We've seen several examples recently of Japanese corporate culture's secrecy and lack of candor. Toyota, TEPCO nuclear plant and now Sony same pattern of not wanting to admit to the problem. I wouldn't bet on their long term competitiveness.

I think corporate ass-covering is pretty pan-cultural. See RSA's recent "we're answering every question other than the one that everyone is asking" PR about the SecurID thing.

I know, there was a previous article on the cover-up culture that once made it to the top at HN.

Re: Sony: All personal data stolen from PSN

#189

Post by ovi256 » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 11:45 PM UTC

GrandMasterBirt wrote: post #58

nathanb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, right? Reading through the comments on that post, the "you should have told us this last week" comments are just about balanced out by the "why are you wasting time with this instead of getting the PSN back online" comments.

The problem is audience: Kids don't give a shit. Privacy is crap, they got their penis pictures on facebook. They want their fucking video games. People playing games all day don't give a shit. They want their fucking games, stfu privacy and get moar kof33 and fucking get this shit online. People with money to lose care. They care that their information is stolen because that could lead to their money being stolen. P…

Oh noes, some people value different things than me how dare they.

Let's be all elitist and imply "kids" don't know the value of information, whatever that may be. More like they know the information PSN had on them didn't matter (some nickname and email). And yeah, they want they games online, that's why they paid for a PS3 and multiplayer videogames after all. And Sony promised online multiplay.

That's a badly made chain of arguments.

Re: Sony: All personal data stolen from PSN

#190

Post by ams6110 » Tue, Apr 26, 2011, 11:46 PM UTC

I think that what we're seeing here is evidence that there's just too many ways to screw up handling personal information on line. The sane stance is to now assume that any profile you provide to any website will eventually become public, and proceed accordingly.