Sony's hacking crisis deepens as the company again delays the return of the PlayStation Network and Qriosity services - which they had said would be back online within a few days, but now might not come back before May 31.
Last week, Sony were strongly suggesting that services could be
restored within a week - they said in a statement that they were in 'the
final stages of internal testing of the new system' - but over the
weekend they announced that
the return of the PSN had been delayed.
And now that date looks to have slipped even further, with a Sony spokesman
telling Bloomberg
that they were uncertain of when the networks would be back, with May
31 the only firm date they would give for the complete restart of
services.
Sony have explained away the slipping restart date by
saying: 'We were unaware of the extent of the attack on Sony Online
Entertainment servers, and we are taking this opportunity to conduct
further testing of the incredibly complex system.'
It comes after
Sony admitted it had suffered a third, smaller data breach, with the
names and partial addresses of 2,500 customers who entered a sweepstake
in 2001 being stolen by hackers who targeted what Sony described as an
'out-of-date' website.
The identity of the hackers remains unknown, and it isn't even clear if the same group is responsible for each different attack.
Sony has hinted that it believes the Anonymous collective may
have been responsible, although the attacks don''t appear to fit the
standard Anonymous modus operandi and Anonymous has released statements
denying responsibility. However, on Friday,
two Anonymous participants told the Financial Times that they thought individuals connected with the loose hacktivist collective may have been responsible.
Explaining
the nature of Anonymous - which is less a membership group, more of a
concept - one Anon, 'Kayla', told the FT: 'If you say you are Anonymous,
and do something as Anonymous, then Anonymous did it... Just because
the rest of Anonymous might not agree with it, doesn’t mean Anonymous
didn’t do it.'
Crucially, they revealed that a possible attack
vector which may have been used in the security breach was discussed on
the open Anonymous chat channels before the attack occurred.
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