Sony will be reinstating a limited number of PlayStation Network services within the next week and offering free PlayStation Plus subscriptions to users affected by their recent hacker-induced loss of service, Sony announced in a press release.
However, earlier this morning, Sony announced that the Sony Online Entertainment branch of their Internet services was also hacked, causing the release of 24.6 million additional users’ information and more than 12,700 credit cards. “EverQuest,” “Free Realms,” “DC Universe Online,” several Facebook games and other online titles are all currently unplayable due to this attack.
The SOE information taken included names, home addresses, e-mail addresses, birthdates, gender, login names and passwords. The credit card information taken was from a 2007 database holding the likely outdated information for non-U.S. users.
For the attack on SOE, Sony will be offering free 30-day subscriptions to customers and free play time for each additional day the game services are down.
For the PSN attack, Sony will be taking the following steps to provide consolation services, labeled the “Welcome Back” program, for their affected users and fix the security flaws:
- Free entertainment content (possibly downloadable games or themes), which will differ across regions
- 30 free days of PlayStation Plus service for both new and existing members
- Existing Qriosity subscribers will receive 30 free days of the service
- Restore Online gameplay on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable within the coming week
- Restore PlayStation Home, friends lists and chat functionality
- Force all users to reset their passwords through a mandatory firmware update
- Move the database servers to a new location
- Create a new job, Chief Information Security Officer, to solely monitor user data security
- Instate the use of software monitoring to detect further attacks
- Enhanced data encryption and additional firewalls
There is no official timeline set for the restoration of additional PSN or other related Sony services other than “the coming weeks.”
Update: Since this was originally published, Sony has clarified that the attacks on SOE were not a second attack but rather part of the PSN attack.
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