Sony has sent a letter to game publishers that detail some new information regarding the security breach that eventually forced the company to shut off the PSN gaming network. The letter, which was then leaked to Industry Gamers, was sent out to publishers to provide information and to reassure them of the viability of the PSN platform.
Senior vice president of Publisher Relations at Sony, Rob Dyer, wrote in the letter the details of the PSN outage, most of which are well known, including the theft of 77 million account details. But Dyer also included some information that wasn't made public by Sony.
The letters say that Sony only became aware of the intrusion after several of its servers repeatedly rebooted themselves, which led Sony to investigate the possible cause. It was then that Sony discovered the intrusion, originally thought to be limited to only 4 servers, but later increased to 10 servers, and it was this time that Sony decided to pull the plug on the PSN.
Sony also detailed some of the actions of the hackers, which had managed to get inside Sony's systems and "escalate privileges inside the servers". The hackers also apparently hid their tracks well, by deleting logs files that otherwise would have shown what they had done.
Meanwhile, reports are emerging that gamers are trading in their PS3s for cash or Xbox 360s, with some stores reporting trade-ins are up 200% compared to before the PSN outage, with half of the people opting for cash, and the other half opting for a Xbox 360 and most traders were FPS gamers, those playing Modern Warfare 2 or Black Ops. Although many other stores reported no changes in terms of trade-ins, retailers in the UK also reports that games sales on the PS3 platform has been dropping steadily since the PSN outage. Using figures for the game FIFA 11, the percentage of the game being purchased on the PS3 has dropped from as high as 37% before the outage, to as low as 21%. CoD: Black Ops also saw a similar drop, from 40% to 24%.
With the PSN still down, Sony will hope the online service comes back soon, so that the exodus can be stopped or at least slowed down.
Do you think PS3 sales will be greatly affected by the PSN outage? Post your opinion in this news article's comments section, or in this forum thread:
http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=94852
Source: CNET, ZDNet, DailyTech
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