For seventy million users of Sony’s PlayStation Network, this is a weird time — one in which they’re being simultaneously deprived of the shoot-em-ups they crave and used as pawns in an epic conflagration between Sony and a shadowy, wily opponent. It started on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th, when a post on Sony’s PSN blog noted that the PlayStation Network and Qriocity service — which the PlayStation 3 console relies on for multiplayer PlayStation 3 games, movies, and music — were out of commission. A day later, another post estimated that it might be a day or two before they returned. Then one announced that Sony had detected an “external intrusion” and had intentionally taken the services offline to fortify them.
On Tuesday of this week, the PSN blog disclosed an explosive new twist: the external intruder had obtained customers’ names, handles, e-mail addresses, mailing addresses, passwords, and birthdates — and possibly purchase histories and the security questions that supposedly help protect accounts from unauthorized access. How about credit-card info? Sony said it has no reason to think that that was purloined, but it’s not positive that it wasn’t.
