Ever since Sony won the case against hacker Geohot, it’s facing a pretty bad time. With Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) being down for more than a month, Sony has lost $172 million. This cost is nearly same to the losses incurred by Sony with Japan’s Earthquake & Tsunami. PSN was not online for more than 2 days after it was back up again about a couple days ago.
Now finally when Sony’s PSN network went online about 2 days back, it’s other service, SonyPictures.com has been hacked and information of over one million customers has been compromised.
Who hacked SonyPictures.com?
The Hacker group LulzSec has claimed responsibility of the attack. This is a new group seeking attention and it previously hacked Fox News & PBS in less than one month time.
What information is compromised?
Over 1,000,000 users’ personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts has been compromised. Also, all admin details of Sony Pictures (including passwords) along with 75,000 “music codes” and 3.5 million “music coupons” has been breached.
How Did the Attack Happen?
The most important thing is that the attack happened due to a simple SQL Injection. Bad Luck Sony! I cannot imagine that a company as big as Sony cannot patch such simple injections. And the more worse thing is that Sony stored all the passwords in unencrypted format. All the data was stored in plain-text.
What Next?
Although Sony has managed to get the website running back again, this is a great loss of information. Privacy of all it’s customers is endangered. As a proof for hacking Sony, the LulzSec team has also made this data available for download, including the personal information, passwords and the music coupons. If you’re amongst the one who’s information has been disclosed, I suggest you change your passwords to be on the safer side.
We hope that Sony secures it’s other networks in the mean time to prevent attack on it’s other services.
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