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Forums - Sony Discussion - Sony hack could cost Sony $318 per account!?

irstupid on 27 April 2011
Jereel Hunter said:
irstupid said:

you guys still don't get it.  This per user amount is a bullshit amount that accounts for nothing.  The estimated costs of this situation is roughly 23 billion dollars.

THAT'S IT.  End of story.  Doesn't matter how many are fake accounts or how many of you don't buy anything on the psn.  This 23 billion dollars doesn't get affected by that.  That 318 is just a bs mathematical number they got by taking 23 billion and dividing it by 70 million.  it means nothing.  The only number that matters is 23 billion.


But that 23 billion is clearly nonsense. You're saying this little intrusion is going to cost them all the money the playstation brand has made in 20 years? Bam, gone? Unless every single person who's ever made a PSN account decides they need to take serious legal action, there's no chance of it coming remotely close to that cost.

thats not how legal action works.  one person would win and n oone else would be able to sue.  you can't be sued over the same thing twice.

and you are also missing what these costs include.  thse numbers are mostly guestimates of missing revenue or lost sales.  I mean during this down time, sony could have missed out on getting a few billion in psn sales.  meanwhile they are incuring a few billion more in costs.  Thus what would have been a 3 billion revenue, turns into a 0 billion revenue and 3 billion expense.  a 6 billion dollars cost overall.   and lets not forget stock.  these also estimate a loss in stock value.

is sony going to have to fork oer 23 billion dolalrs?  hell no. 



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Baalzamon on 27 April 2011
irstupid said:

To those saying that it took average, then times by 70.  Ok yea, i see that.  So please tell me, how do fake accounts, duplicate accounts ect lower that cost?  how does sony know to ignore these accounts?  thats not how this works.  They dont' go through every account individually.  They need to fix a problem affecting 70 million accounts.  It does not matter if those accounts are nothing more than a login and password.  THis is a figure take by looking at other situations and how much it took to fix them and their account numbers.  THe more account numbers the harder it is to fix

How do fake/duplicate/etc accounts affect them?  Yes, they may still have to do certain things with these accounts, but if somebody has 5 accounts, they won't be able to get 5 times their share if a lawsuit is presented against Sony.  Obviously the overall repairs to the servers, and certain costs will be fixed (at least to a degree) whether there are 20 million, or 70 million true psn users, but a lawsuit, which would be by far what I would consider to be the biggest cost Sony may face, will be considerably lower if there are in fact only 20 million users instead of 70 million users.

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I'd also be interested to know if this data is assuming that bank account numbers are credit/debit card numbers are being stolen off of every account.  It still hasn't been confirmed whether the credit/debit data was stolen, and I defiantly don't see how costs could be that high if this isn't involved.



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Squilliam on 27 April 2011

I think the figure may be slightly overstated.



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Jdevil3 on 27 April 2011
irstupid said:
Baalzamon said:
irstupid said:

where do you think they got this 318 average?

Have you seriously still not read the article?  "The Institute claims that the average cost of a data breach in 2010 was $318 per malicious act." (Can you see it now?).  The average cost of a data breach in 2010 was $318 per malicious act.  That is what this institute came up with.  Based on this average cost from 2010, they are then taking the total number of psn users, 70,000,000, and multiplying by what the average cost per each of those users would be, or $318.  You then get $22.26 billion.

yea i missed that earlier, but still doesn't change fact.

this malicious act average is taken by looking at similart things.  Lets say master card had this problem and use same figures as ps3.  There are 70 million master card holders.  We can all agree that these are ALL legit accounts and not duplicates, or fake names, ect right? 

Now what does master card do?   Do they go through each individual account and fix it?  hell no, they work on teh problem as one big whole.  It costs them 22.26 billion dollars to fix the problem.  It did not cost them 318 per account, it cost them total 22.26 billion dollars.  that 318 is a bullshit number you get by dividing by # of accounts.  It means nothing.  

That 318 is just some average bs number gotten from lookikng at all the costs in the year dealing with this stuff and dividing by # accounts.  It means nothing.  Its just a rough way of guessing how much a situation like this will cost the company.

This could end up costing sony a couple billion, or up to 50 billion who knows.  BUT the fact that half of those 70 million accounts are fake or not means absoultely NOTHING. 


Isn't Sony's market cap something like 30 billion... and by the way, I just read this somewhere:

"The article is talking about potential losses to account holders totalling $24B ($300 figure they proposed x 77 million accounts)... not how much money sony will lose..."

Is that true?

Otherwise, I don't know how the hell Sony could spend 23 billion just on creating PSN from the ground up with new security measures, restoring their account info (PSN accounts) into the new servers (if needed) and investigating the problem's cause and potential damages caused.



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walkerj on 27 April 2011

Of course this isn't true! God I don't know why people bothr with these stupid proedictions. The average cost of a data breach was 318 dollars. Per BREACH not per USER. Most breaches like this don't cost anyone money. The credit company tends to swallow individual claims. Ex. Someone steals your card and buys something from newegg.com. You complain to the credit company, they reemberse you and usually issue a new card. Newegg has your money, but the credit company pays you back.  And this only applies to the people who are actually victims of credit theft, which currently ammounts to 0 people. The biggest cost for Sony will be PR and how ever many millions they are paying this private security firm.  

There is no user to breach ratio that can be applied here. Imagine most security breached include a hundred people. Now imagine the cost of the break is $31,800. That is 318 dollars per person. Now imagine the breach involves 1500 people. The cost is still going to be $31,800 to fix the problem. The price of fixing broken security doesn't magically increase based on user accounts.

 

If K-mart is compromised and 100 peoples info goes out there it costs them the same as if 1,000 peoples info gets out there. They don't absorb the cost of reimbersement, and Sony definitely doesn't. This stuff was obtained from a hacked PS3 with a custom firmware and a hackers program.

Unless security firm Alpha charges 23 billion per review, then this report is absolute trash.



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imaprettyhotguy on 27 April 2011
irstupid said:
Baalzamon said:
irstupid said:

where do you think they got this 318 average?

Have you seriously still not read the article?  "The Institute claims that the average cost of a data breach in 2010 was $318 per malicious act." (Can you see it now?).  The average cost of a data breach in 2010 was $318 per malicious act.  That is what this institute came up with.  Based on this average cost from 2010, they are then taking the total number of psn users, 70,000,000, and multiplying by what the average cost per each of those users would be, or $318.  You then get $22.26 billion.

yea i missed that earlier, but still doesn't change fact.

this malicious act average is taken by looking at similart things.  Lets say master card had this problem and use same figures as ps3.  There are 70 million master card holders.  We can all agree that these are ALL legit accounts and not duplicates, or fake names, ect right? 

Now what does master card do?   Do they go through each individual account and fix it?  hell no, they work on teh problem as one big whole.  It costs them 22.26 billion dollars to fix the problem.  It did not cost them 318 per account, it cost them total 22.26 billion dollars.  that 318 is a bullshit number you get by dividing by # of accounts.  It means nothing.  

That 318 is just some average bs number gotten from lookikng at all the costs in the year dealing with this stuff and dividing by # accounts.  It means nothing.  Its just a rough way of guessing how much a situation like this will cost the company.

This could end up costing sony a couple billion, or up to 50 billion who knows.  BUT the fact that half of those 70 million accounts are fake or not means absoultely NOTHING. 

The estimate is based off the users though so you can't take the users out of the equation and expect any accuracy, likewise there is no accuracy in this number anyways so you shouldn't be defending it as accurate 



walkerj on 27 April 2011

Half of the accounts aren't fake, that's an insanely stupid thing to say. My PS3 has 3 accounts belonging to real people who don't have their own console. My console is the only one with there account. They have there own info and passwords and log in.

Just because there are more accounts that ps3's doesn't mean those extra accounts are fake.



imaprettyhotguy on 27 April 2011
Jdevil3 said:
irstupid said:
Baalzamon said:
irstupid said:

where do you think they got this 318 average?

Have you seriously still not read the article?  "The Institute claims that the average cost of a data breach in 2010 was $318 per malicious act." (Can you see it now?).  The average cost of a data breach in 2010 was $318 per malicious act.  That is what this institute came up with.  Based on this average cost from 2010, they are then taking the total number of psn users, 70,000,000, and multiplying by what the average cost per each of those users would be, or $318.  You then get $22.26 billion.

yea i missed that earlier, but still doesn't change fact.

this malicious act average is taken by looking at similart things.  Lets say master card had this problem and use same figures as ps3.  There are 70 million master card holders.  We can all agree that these are ALL legit accounts and not duplicates, or fake names, ect right? 

Now what does master card do?   Do they go through each individual account and fix it?  hell no, they work on teh problem as one big whole.  It costs them 22.26 billion dollars to fix the problem.  It did not cost them 318 per account, it cost them total 22.26 billion dollars.  that 318 is a bullshit number you get by dividing by # of accounts.  It means nothing.  

That 318 is just some average bs number gotten from lookikng at all the costs in the year dealing with this stuff and dividing by # accounts.  It means nothing.  Its just a rough way of guessing how much a situation like this will cost the company.

This could end up costing sony a couple billion, or up to 50 billion who knows.  BUT the fact that half of those 70 million accounts are fake or not means absoultely NOTHING. 


Isn't Sony's market cap something like 30 billion... and by the way, I just read this somewhere:

"The article is talking about potential losses to account holders totalling $24B ($300 figure they proposed x 77 million accounts)... not how much money sony will lose..."

Is that true?

Otherwise, I don't know how the hell Sony could spend 23 billion just on creating PSN from the ground up with new security measures, restoring their account info (PSN accounts) into the new servers (if needed) and investigating the problem's cause and potential damages caused.

It's just a bs number based on an end result in a case with some similiarities in 2010 times the amount of psn users, thats like me saying 360 sold 50 million has a 68% failrate at launch and the system at one point costed around 400 to make so it's going to cost MS 14 billion



walkerj on 27 April 2011

PER MALICIOUS ACT. Downloading a file with three passwords isn't three malicious acts. By this math Sony will be out $318 dollars. Oh wait, these numbers are total bullshit so this topic should be closed



richardhutnik on 27 April 2011
Acevil said:
Troll_Whisperer said:
irstupid said:

on the news last night they said could cost sony 23 billion dollars.

so that sounds like from same source.  i mean what is 70 million times 318? 

22.3 billion, so yeah.

It sounds like an aweful lot. How can the cost be THAT high? What do they have to do to fix it? I mean, the whole losses of the PS3 so far are like 4.7bn right? So this will cost FIVE times more than all losses the PS3 has taken since launch?

If it's true... poor Sony. Anyway, nothing's for sure yet. Let's wait and see.

The problem however assumes that 70 million users had information that would cause problems. It would be more reasonable to assume much smaller number, but worse comes to worse. Sony will be harmed in the billions and harmed in the media. 

So, that then is worst case scenario?  That would make a lot of sense then.  As as a default, it looks like a NO WAY.