April's Hacker News

By now, you have probably heard of Sony's escalating issues with their Play Station Network (PSN). Their PSN is inaccessible worldwide, claiming, "...the current emergency outage is continuing this afternoon and all Sony Online Network services remain unavailable. Our support teams are investigating the cause of the problem, including the possibility of targeted behavior by an outside party. If the reported Network problems are indeed caused by such acts, we would like to once again thank our customers who have borne the brunt of the attack through interrupted service." This is the 4th day in Sony's current outage, but don't get it confused, Sony took their own network down this time. Sony is tying to fix critical security infrastructure after Anonymous brought them down earlier this month, via DDOS. Now there is a bit of misinformation circulating this crash, one such rumor is that the entire PSN and Sony internal network is connected, so if one crashes they all crash. In my humble opinion, this is false due to the fact that the "sp-int" network is still up, Sony's developer network. Also in Sony news, the Consumer Board of Finland recently ruled in favor of a Finish man, saying Sony should pay him 100 Euros because they went back on their Linux OS statements, the way the PS3 was originally advertised. So it seems as if Sony has not only security and network issues, but they also have policy and legal issues. Sometimes I wonder if this is just karma getting back at Sony for that rootkit fiasco from 2005. In other hacker news, The US Government was recently pwn'd again, tricked by a simple phishing e-mail. On a depressing note, the very vulnerability leveraged in their version of IE, was the one discovered and awarded at the Pwn2Own competition! Update your browsers or switch to something more secure!!