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Rath on 23 June 2011
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brendude13 said:
Rath said:
CGI-Quality said:
 

As a matter of fact, several companies have lost customer info (some on a significant scale). Again, the PSN situation dwarfs recent attacks and nobody has denied that Sony f*ed up on security, but it has been exaggerated and other attacks have been nearly as bad. They just weren't against a gaming network itself, giving Sony's situation more headlines. Simple matter of media coverage.

It's all about scale, as you say the Sony attack dwarfs pretty much all others. The biggest of the other attacks recently have been ~1 million customers, Sony was ~100 million. While recent attacks have been bad (and show that other companies also have pretty poor security) none of them were in charge of as much customer data as Sony, which is why Sony has been more widely covered - also I don't think most of the other hacks involved credit card information in any form, and credit cards get people twitchy.

This is where things get blown out of proportion, some people actually listen to the media. There aren't even 100 million Playstation customers, let alone accounts. The true number is less than that, far less. And that is without taking into account whether they had access to ALL of the PSN accounts. Throw in the fact that all of the information the hackers gained was worthless (unless you're extremely paranoid) and you will realise that this PSN fiasco has been blown way out of proportion.

It wasn't only PSN that's included in that - the hack of SOE  is generally also included (despite being a seperate hack) because it's still data stolen from Sony. Still the PSN hack alone of ~77M is the biggest ever.

Also you're very very wrong about it being worthless information. The data that was stolen (passwords, emails, names, birth dates, addresses etc.) on mass amounts to enough data to for one thing hack into a lot of peoples other online accounts and for another thing to be used for identity theft. Also the email addresses have simple value to spammers.

https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/13864-Hacker-Offers-Insight-On-Sony-PSN-Breach.html

 

Media really hasn't blown this out of proportion, it is a major event. It's actually probably more of a landmark event in terms of network security than it is in terms of gaming (where it's not likely to have a massive long term impact) which may be why people on a gaming forum like this one feel it has been blown out of proportion.