Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve the current outage of PlayStation Network & Qriocity services. We are currently working to send a similar message to the one below via email to all of our registered account holders regarding a compromise of personal information as a result of an illegal intrusion on our systems. These malicious actions have also had an impact on your ability to enjoy the services provided by PlayStation Network and Qriocity including online gaming and online access to music, movies, sports and TV shows. We have a clear path to have PlayStation Network and Qriocity systems back online, and expect to restore some services within a week.
We’re working day and night to ensure it is done as quickly as possible. We appreciate your patience and feedback.
Valued PlayStation Network/Qriocity Customer:
We have discovered that between April 17 and April 19, 2011, certain PlayStation Network and Qriocity service user account information was compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into our network. In response to this intrusion, we have:
- Temporarily turned off PlayStation Network and Qriocity services;
- Engaged an outside, recognized security firm to conduct a full and complete investigation into what happened; and
- Quickly taken steps to enhance security and strengthen our network infrastructure by re-building our system to provide you with greater protection of your personal information.
We greatly appreciate your patience, understanding and goodwill as we do whatever it takes to resolve these issues as quickly and efficiently as practicable.
Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained.
For your security, we encourage you to be especially aware of email, telephone, and postal mail scams that ask for personal or sensitive information. Sony will not contact you in any way, including by email, asking for your credit card number, social security number or other personally identifiable information. If you are asked for this information, you can be confident Sony is not the entity asking. When the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services are fully restored, we strongly recommend that you log on and change your password. Additionally, if you use your PlayStation Network or Qriocity user name or password for other unrelated services or accounts, we strongly recommend that you change them, as well.
To protect against possible identity theft or other financial loss, we encourage you to remain vigilant, to review your account statements and to monitor your credit reports. We are providing the following information for those who wish to consider it:
U.S. residents are entitled under U.S. law to one free credit report annually from each of the three major credit bureaus. To order your free credit report, visit www.annualcreditreport.com or call toll-free (877) 322-8228.
We have also provided names and contact information for the three major U.S. credit bureaus below. At no charge, U.S. residents can have these credit bureaus place a “fraud alert” on your file that alerts creditors to take additional steps to verify your identity prior to granting credit in your name. This service can make it more difficult for someone to get credit in your name. Note, however, that because it tells creditors to follow certain procedures to protect you, it also may delay your ability to obtain credit while the agency verifies your identity. As soon as one credit bureau confirms your fraud alert, the others are notified to place fraud alerts on your file. Should you wish to place a fraud alert, or should you have any questions regarding your credit report, please contact any one of the agencies listed below.
Experian: 888-397-3742; www.experian.com; P.O. Box 9532, Allen, TX 75013
Equifax: 800-525-6285; www.equifax.com; P.O. Box 740241, Atlanta, GA 30374-0241
TransUnion: 800-680-7289; www.transunion.com; Fraud Victim Assistance Division, P.O. Box 6790, Fullerton, CA 92834-6790You may wish to visit the web site of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission at www.consumer.gov/idtheft or reach the FTC at 1-877-382-4357 or 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20580 for further information about how to protect yourself from identity theft. Your state Attorney General may also have advice on preventing identity theft, and you should report instances of known or suspected identity theft to law enforcement, your State Attorney General, and the FTC. For North Carolina residents, the Attorney General can be contacted at 9001 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699-9001; telephone (877) 566-7226; or www.ncdoj.gov. For Maryland residents, the Attorney General can be contacted at 200 St. Paul Place, 16th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21202; telephone: (888) 743-0023; or www.oag.state.md.us.
We thank you for your patience as we complete our investigation of this incident, and we regret any inconvenience. Our teams are working around the clock on this, and services will be restored as soon as possible. Sony takes information protection very seriously and will continue to work to ensure that additional measures are taken to protect personally identifiable information. Providing quality and secure entertainment services to our customers is our utmost priority. Please contact us at 1-800-345-7669 should you have any additional questions.
Sincerely,
Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony Network Entertainment
The same information can be found at the following websites:
http://us.playstation.com/news/consumeralerts/#non-us
For those that live the United States, but not Massachusetts or Puerto Rico:
http://us.playstation.com/news/consumeralerts/#us
If you live in Massachusetts:
http://us.playstation.com/news/consumeralerts/#mass
If you live in Puerto Rico
http://us.playstation.com/news/consumeralerts/#pr
While Givens was quick to point out that Sony may not have broken any laws, she’s not willing to praise the company. “When you look at past business crises, and there are business school case studies of these things, you get high praise if you come out early and clearly with information about the breach,” she said. This is something Sony did not do. “Not just a little bit of information, but a lot of information so individuals know what has happened and what they need to do.”
-from ars technica
so if your selling your stuff your presence here is moot right ? i mean …. if your done then so is your discusion right ? also folks they are not certain that CC info was stolen .
Well for those of you who still want to play some with their friends, you should read my post on using Xlink Kai to play some Playstation games online: http://community.us.playstation.com/thread/3423800?tstart=0
What a bunch of moaning ***** most of you lot are :-/ Thanks for the info SONY. Hopefully soon PSN will be back to normal;)
Also we like to request that. Each console has to register with sony in order to use a psn card and if they lose there pin number of pass word there would be 2$ charge by mail for a replacement fee of it.
Also those who are complaining that they will go to xbox, just know a hacker group named rus hacked gamers on xbox live CC#account for over 1 million dollars this happen’d in 2007 and 2008 and it continues to happen to this day. So If you think x box live service is any bettter go ahead and get robbed blind.
In these times of peril we dont need to be angry,, we need to understand how to do things better.. not for your self but for everyone. Be safe everyone and god bless
mcbuttz78
vp-psn legionarre commitee
Gosh, I was slow to get in this one. Was gaming and all. ;)
Anyways, My CC is stored in PSN…..havent seen anything unusual….didn’t get an email from sony….not really worried about it. If they stole my Identity, it’ll cause more problems than it’s worth, and wont get them credit/cars/boats. LOL
My unemployment gets me through, so if they want enough $$ to get a few gallons of gas or some PSN games (oh wait, they can just take those…) that’s about all they will get.
But it’s absolutely pathetic to announce to it’s customers 6 days after the event, that their ID might be at risk. Unacceptable in any form or fashion….for whatever the underlying reason may be.
When PSN goes Live…..if Sony has ONE SINGLE OUNCE of customer appreciation, esp. after this PR disaster, they need to have a STOREWIDE SALE…yes, every single thing in the store on sale for EVERYONE (PS+ can get extra discounts). Min. of 30% off.
So your network became compromised and you close it down 4 days later. Then you wait a week to notify your customers!!! Awesome Sony, the hackers have a 10 day head start with my information! Just an FYI I’ll be part of the class action law-suit against you so that you can pay for my Identity Theft insurance for the next 2 years. Just like the Congressman from Connecticut proposed to Jack Trenton today. And I’d bet good money Sony is going to be subpoenaed next month to Congress along with Apple and Google concerning Identity Theft. I understand that things happen and that these hackers should be brought to justice. I’m just furious with the lack of information, and the fact that you covered your ***es first before notifying the public. If your IT guys so much as suspected that that information was compromised we the customers should of been notified first!!! With out a cryptic message stating that things will be up in a day or two.
BTW whats going to happen to my paid subscription to DCUO and Free Realms?
lol still, then keep it off longer.
Sucks but I’m not worried. Oooh now they may know my name and address. Even birthday. I’ll still play my PS3 and play on PSN and buy stuff from PSN. I’m more worried about my trophies. I put a lot of work into it and don’t want it screwed with.
I’ll be ready to sign in next week when your back up and running Sony. I have some items I’ve been waiting to buy. Thanks for the update.
Ahhhh class-action suits. Consumers way to get companies to accept responsibility for something that they very well knew what was going on. If I’m compromised, you’ll see me on that list.
@king. The whole console was in encrypted who told you it was not in order for it to do cc transaction it has to be encrptyed/ thats the law my friend//
What you need to do is get your personal information on point . Becuase if you cant trust sony then you need to trust yourself and do what right for self and thats get your cc numbers and information secure. What has happened is the same as a bank robbery.Of course the banks have guards there with a gun but they cant take on army of robbers and when the robber steal money that day and you pullup at 4pm to a withdrawl the bank is closed down.
Thats not he bank fault they did ther part in holding your money and information with a guard and file cabneits. They cannt stop a robbery from happening or know when it going to happen, once the sercurity guard go down all they can do is pray for the best for there customers and then shutdown and investigate.
I have been fustrated over this i will agree, as with alot of other people. I sure alot of people will say things out of fustration. Im sure i have. I just Hope they take all steps to catch and put a stop to the people that are behind this. We all just want to be able to play games on and offline, while feeling safe that all our info is safe. I do still think Sony should have made more percautions for a situation like this considering this is not the first time they have been hacked. But its done now and lets just hope this dosnt happin again.
And if my trophy list is gone, after all this single player work while we’re offline, I’m going to sue b-real. ;)
I’m sure he can research the reason why! (love research and information, btw)
@every positive thinker: +1 to you all. Glad to see we still have some smart people in the world.
Sony! i have an announcement. please go to youtube and search for opsony : sony press release. its a warning video. look i dont do this to scare you guys but am scared too because in that video they say why and what are they doing. see this video please, there atacking you.
Sony, You guys are going to be in hot water for not releasing this in a timely manner. Also, you need to give at least 2 years paid service of Credit monitoring services to all persons whose information was compromised.
I find it funny…
“…we encourage you to remain vigilant, to review your account statements and to monitor your credit reports.”
Just like how you guys, “…remained vigilant [and reviewed security of the PSN & PS Store, and allowed our personal information to potentially get stolen…”
What’s worse is that you guys still don’t know if things got stolen or not.
This blog post that you guys just posted today, should’ve been the first thing that went up on the site…not 6 days later.
Sony.
I hope you guys are prepared to face massive lawsuits on a global scale for being too stupid to not have a more secure system and piss of computer science & hackers around the world by removing the other OS and PS2 backwards compatibility.
I’m calling my attorney.
I think we are missing the point here, Sony is not at fault here. GeoHot is fully responsible for this, and Rebug.me for the CFW that enabled users to steel the information in the first place. This Rebug CFW was built on GeoHot’s original Jailbreak and used to access our information. Sony pulled the plug on PSN the minute it was discovered. They had to confirm that our information had been stolen “first” before they released that statement. So who is to blame here? GeoHot and Rebug.me for giving users the tools to obtain our information. Sony are victims along with us.
I don’t know why any of you are posting here…
No one from Sony is gonna read it…
@tacotaskforce . Hey man (girl?) ! You’re famous!
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/04/26/playstation.network.hack/index.html?iref=NS1
@I-B0SS_Zombie-I
You don’t know that. Sony may or may not read this. But at the very least, we have the option for voicing ourselves.
http:// arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/04/sonys-black-eye-is-a-pr-problem-not-a-legal-one.ars
^^^that is for the people that want to sue. Sony legally has the wiggle room…..by all means though give it try. This is the USA
Well then, I hope my credit card info wasn’t stolen. If so, this seems to be the worst nightmare you could have envisioned… (if hundreds of thousands of customer’s info was stolen).
But, hopefully that is not the case.
Good luck with this PR nightmare (that you brought on yourselves apparently).
And for those speculating about a fee for online access. It’ll be the worst thing they can possibly do and they will really lose a gluttony of customers. It’s the ONE thing that really distinguishes PSN from LIVE for those who want to play games online… for free (like it should be…we already bought the game, should be allowed to play everything it allows FOR FREE…anyways), especially in this global economy. And frankly, if it’s a pay service, the PS3 will go down in flames and those poor stockholders….yikes. And they would need to really “bring it” with online content if they did they…and first chance DLC’s (so we can tell xsmucks to suck it, lol)
…alright enough of my tangent…..
@nike on what grounds can you sue on?
Sony provided free sercurity and it was compromised by some hackers.Now you can get a legal team and they will tell you the same thing ” what grounds are you suing on” show us some proof that you have been harmed or your account has been harmed.As of Right now you cannot do that neither can sony.
We can go by speculation of what sony said has happend. but your going to need to prove you really had a account and money on the psn network and it was effected.. Lawyers dont go by word of mouth.. It may look easy to prove but its not. If you cannot prove neglect then you dont have much of a case
come on sony, can’t believe you are going to wait almost a week then tell people “hey someone might have got your creditcard info, sorry about that”. thats just bad juju on your part. you have loyal customers, some that defend the ps3 everyday to friends, co-workers and of course on the internet . need to show some loyalty back sony. look out for your customers like we look out for you.
Thank you Sony for waiting ONE week to tell people with CC. You guys are seriously screwed up this generation, but this one takes the cake. Jesus Christ.
And to think I was a one of those customers that did not want to lose OtherOS and was completely against the way they handled that.
But now, I can understand Sony’s thinking. The hackers have pretty much confirmed Sony’s reasons.
I’m really getting tired of “you shoulda told us earlier” or “you waited a week to tell us our CC info was stolen”
How do you know they knew about all of that a week ago? How do you know that it isn’t an investigation that takes time? They probably didn’t find out until this morning.
SPACEEEEEEEE!
@305
1. The cake is a lie
2. How do you know they knew that information was stolen a week ago?
Thank you Sony for keeping it free. I can’t complain at all. A week isn’t nothing compared to what I have saved. YOU ROCK! The people responsible weren’t even after personal info. They just wanted bragging rights. Funny how this all happened after the merge with Steam.
I hope we are back on line by the end of the week. Hey while you are fixing security can you also add few features to PSN, thanks.
they just finish their investigation u noobs, so they didn’t know if it was compromised or not and the investigation was done by an outside company so they didn’t know until that company told them. And you should have contacted your CC companies just in case already to make sure nothing has gone adrift. Sony will reimburse you if your CC was used just give them a call noobs.
but anyway … while all you babies are pissing and moaning about the why’s and what’s im moving forward and can’t wait for it to be back up and running again .
BTW The illusion that the PSN was immune to hacking …was just that … and naive to think to boot … anyway heres to them getting it back online ASAP .
Hey they have the crappy Shaun White Skateboarding at Best Buy for $7 if anybody likes to earn trophies.
Finally…. something useful!
hence, i only buy the psn cards in 20 and 50 dollar increments. and i do believe that sony at one time challenged anybody to hack them. well it looks like it only took what 5-6 years? just set up the security in a multi-phase changing pattern the way many companies do their business, or else this has been one seriously peeved former employee from your company.
@306. Sony themselves said it was April 16 when they found out. The next day they should of notified people. Not days or weeks later. Its not just the CC info, its also our personal info. Which can lead to Identity theft. This is going to cost Sony millions and it serves them right.
@STDProne
You’re an idiot if you sincerely believe that it took them 6 days to realize our info was stolen. Do you still believe Santa exists or have your parents not disarm that lie yet?
Furthermore, I wouldn’t go around calling people noobs if you don’t even know how credit card companies work. Sony won’t reimburse us [DELETED], the cc companies will. It’ll be their problem to deal with Sony afterwards.
While I am happy to see atleast two people with a good head on their shoulders (finally.) I’m seriously done listening to the rest of the people here. It’s official. Most of you are way to immature to be taken seriously much less listen to. Almost all of you seriously need to get a grip on reality. The fact that most of you are this upset over this particular situation is astounding to say the least. I’m actually left wondering how, old most of you are. As I and someone else tried to point out. A lot worse has happened, and this is nothing as bad. If you cannot be level headed, mature and rational about this I doubt you’d be able to even get a job or survive in the real world. Kudo’s to one guy in particular for trying to fight the good fight with me, (fuzzyclutter.)
Get a grip people. Most of you should be disgusted with your behavior on here.
315
Interesting, do you have a source? The actual statement?
@STDProne
You’re an idiot if you sincerely believe that it took them 6 days to realize our info was stolen. Do you still believe Santa exists or have your parents not disarmed that lie yet?
Furthermore, I wouldn’t go around calling people noobs if you don’t even know how credit card companies work. Sony won’t reimburse us ****, the cc companies will. It’ll be their problem to deal with Sony afterwards.
315 during the investigation they found out that personal info was compromised between the 17-19 check the phrasing.
enjoy the thousands of compensation claims when the defrauding starts
Unless you put your social security into your account, you’re not going to have your identity stolen. Sheesh, people love to overreact. Settle down.
what if they steal “slot” from us when the PSN is back.
like the psn goes back someone use address email and password and activate one of my slot,
and can change my account right after so i loose everything i bought…
this is scary!