Sony continues to be breached

A month after Sony's PlayStation Network was breached and subsequently shut down, the Japan based company's security woes continue. It all began last month on April 20 when the PSN was breached by a group of hackers who stole millions of names, addresses, and credit card information from online users.

Since the initial breach last month which has been dubbed "The Great PlayStation Network Outage" Sony has continued to battle with hackers who have targeted different branches of the company's infrastructure. While the PlayStation Network was still down earlier this month Sony Online Entertainment also suffered the same type of attack. SOE which is the company's online PC gaming network which host games such as "Star Wars Galaxies", "EverQuest", "DC Universe Online", and many more was forced to shut down for two weeks after customers' personal information had been compromised.

Most recently Sony's security has been breached outside of their gaming networks. Earlier this week Sony revealed that 8,500 Greek users personal information had been stolen along with sites stationed in Thailand and Indonesia. Today the company's most recent breach involved a Canadian Sony Ericsson music website, which forced the site to shut down after 2,000 people's names, e-mail addresses, and passwords were stolen and published on a hacking news website.  

As of right now Sony is proving to be unable to protect their customers' personal information that they have entrusted them with. This lack of trust shows in the decline of Sony's stock price since the breaches began and will more than likely have an even more damaging effect when the company's earnings for this quarter are released.

PlayStation Network down till the end of May?

Rumors have spread recently that the disabled PlayStation Network could stay that way until at least May 31st. The network has been down now for almost three weeks and if the rumor is true that would put its total outage time around six weeks.

The patience of many has already been worn thin by what has been dubbed "The great PlayStation Network outage of 2011", on forums and comment boards across the web disgruntled users have expressed their dissatisfaction towards Sony. Some have already given up hope and sold their PlayStation 3's and converted to Microsoft's X Box 360.

While May 31st is not a date set in stone its source comes from a recent report from Bloomberg. In the article Sony spokesman Shigenori Yoshida is quoted as saying "Sony is uncertain when it can resume the services," Yoshida also went on to say "The company is in the process of adopting an improved security system and its plans to restart the services fully by May 31 is unchanged."

Many are taking this with a grain of salt after Sony has already missed three windows they claimed that service would be restored in, the most recent one being last week. Time shall tell if Sony will get the network up and running before the month's end or if they will again disappoint their eager fans.

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PlayStation Network has been hacked.

The official PlayStation website has just announced their online gaming services have been interrupted due to an "external intrusion", in other words they have been hacked. The outage began on Wednesday, April 20th when users were no longer able to neither log in and play their favorite games online nor access any of the features associated with the network such as the PlayStation Store or PlayStation Home, a virtual world much like Second Life.

The ongoing outage has left a massive of amount gamers not only unable to play online but also down right outraged, mainly because of the lack of information being relayed to them by Sony. It took a whole day after this ordeal first began for Sony to inform their customers on what was happening when they posted on their official PlayStation blog that they were aware of the situation and it would take them a day or two to resolve it. In this post they did not give any reason as to the cause or what steps were being done to take care of it.

Now today after much rumor of a hack job taking place, Sony has finally confirmed the suspicions to be true. The questions that remain now are, how long will it take for the PlayStation Network to be fully functional again and how much revenue has Sony already lost due to this outage? Another critical question users should be asking is, has their personal information been jeopardized? With the main focus of that being credit card data, which can be used to purchase content from the PlayStation Store.

Here's a link to the official PlayStation Blog.