The PSN outage threatens to enter its third week.

So, we covered earlier how Sony’s PSN got hacked and subsequently was taken offline for forensic analysis. We covered the lack of clear communication from Sony for around a week and then the announcement that all of our details had been stolen, credit card data may have been compromised. So, it’s time for a recap of what has happened since we last did a recap.

The good news is that Sony have confirmed that although personal information was not encrypted, your credit card details were. The bad news is that is pretty much the only good news.

Sony held a press conference yesterday which more or less rehashed what we already knew, after they had been hacked they voluntarily shut the PSN and Qriocity services down to prevent further problems and to better assess what happened. At the same time, they began working on dramatically beefing up security, which based on (admittedly, unverified) logs of a PSN hacker chat room, is desperately needed. According to the release, they are planning on providing a “Welcome Back” bonus for users, which will take the shape of 30 days free of PlayStation Plus, and some sort of free gift from the PSN Store. The complete PlayStation Network service will be restored this month, but since they announced this on May 1st, it sort of gives them a decent chunk of time to play with. Theoretically during the next week we should see parts of PSN and Qriocity begun to come back to life in the coming week, and many people have pegged the date for restoration as May 3rd.

It’s now May 2nd, and the Internet is not abuzz with news of service restoration but instead that even more of the Sony infrastructure has been shut off. SOE is Sony’s MMO division and is currently unavailable to the world with the following message on their homepage :

We have had to take the SOE service down temporarily. In the course of our investigation into the intrusion into our systems we have discovered an issue that warrants enough concern for us to take the service down effective immediately. We will provide an update later today (Monday).

Whilst it’s possible that this shutdown is not reflective of the expected restoration time of PSN, it’s worrying that it seems to have taken ten days to realise that whatever happened to PSN escalated over to Station as well – it seems that this “intrusion” may be larger in scope than Sony realised.

Meanwhile, reports have been springing up all week of various people offering for sale credit card information “stolen from PSN”. Whether these claims turn out to be true or not, it is rather disturbing. Despite Sony’s assurances that the card information was encrypted, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the hackers have found some vector from which to break the encryption. Although my money still remains on these being scams attempting to cash in on the FUD, it’s worth keeping a very close eye on your bank statements (although really, you should be doing that anyway).

In lighter news, we have learnt this past week that the PlayStation blogs use cookies that are valid for one week, and require PSN for login authentication – after a full week of PSN down-time, there was a dramatic drop-off in the number of people commenting on their posts. Although it seems to have been addressed now, I’m sure there are a lot of people at Sony today who really wish that they hadn’t given people back the ability to voice their displeasure at the way this is unfolding.

As a side note, sometimes, I wish that I could embed a soundtrack to go along with my posts. I won’t subject you to it by force, but I think this one can best be summed up with this.