This year has been terrible for Sony. With one break-in and a detected exploit last week, following many more over the last month, we'd expect nothing to get worse, but it did: another Sony service got broken into, this time Sony Music Japan, the company's Japanese music label.
Sony's recent data breach could cost the company as much as $24.5 billion according to a new infographic put together by PromotionalCodes. The whole palaver began way back on April 19th when Sony discovered that a few PlayStation Network servers had rebooted themselves for no apparent reason. After some research and, we assume much panic, Sony took the unpleasant decision to pull its entire multiplayer network and online store off the internet the next day. The plan was to bring everything back online once the issue was resolved. That took much, much longer than any of us expected.
Sony have today released details of their PSN 'Welcome Back' package for North American customers, with PlayStation Plus service and free games the order of the day.
In news that can't be easy for Japanese PSN fans to read, Sony is being prevented from turning it's PlayStation Network back on by the country's own government.
Sony today pushed out a new software update for its PS3 console in preparation for the return of its PlayStation Network service.
Good news for Sony today, with reports that their PlayStation Network is back online, but you have to be a developer to use it. The news cones from gaming and games industry forum NEOGAF, where forum-goer Kagari reporting that he's been told by a few developers that PSN is back online.
Remember when we told you how CNET had gotten hold of IRC logs that they claimed showed people planning to attack Sony's servers once more? Now the website is claiming Sony actually managed to thwart the would-be hackers, and it's all thanks to them.
Charts handed out by Sony at one of its press conferences to explain the PSN state of play show how the company thinks its gaming network was hacked into, as well as giving a list showing the number of users from each region who's data may have been compromised.
As if two cyber attacks in as many weeks wasn't enough, it appears Sony could be in for a third, according to chatter in a IRC channel.
It seems May isn't going to be any better than April for Sony after the Japanese company was forced to take its Sony Online Entertainment servers offline due to another security breach.
