GameSpot managed to corner Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley during the GDC Online conference this week in Austin, Texas to get his thoughts on the recent attack that resulted in Sony temporarily locking down around 93,000 PlayStation Network, Sony Entertainment Network, and Sony Online Entertainment accounts.
Earlier this week Sony chief information security officer Philip Reitinger said on the PlayStation Blog that that the data used in the attempted security breach likely came from another source and not from Sony's networks. Smedley sheds a little more light on how Sony came to that conclusion:
"It's just simple math," Smedley said. "There was such a small percentage of successes. They were attacking with a large number. Because of that, the math tells us it wasn't [Sony's information]. We've said publicly when we were compromised before that the information is out there and could have been used. That was obviously the first thing we looked at. Then we did the mathematical analysis and said, 'Obviously that's not what happened.' I'm not going to say it's impossible [the info came from Sony]. We just think that's not the most likely case."
Smedley added that the targeted accounts hadn't been accessed since the PlayStation Network was restored.
Smedley adds that the best way to avoid having an account compromised is to regularly change your password.
"We really strongly encourage users to change their passwords," Smedley said. "We can't force them to log in and do that. A great number of these accounts they were going after were dormant accounts. Those people in many cases had not yet done their password change. It takes some work to get them to focus on that."
Source: GameSpot
Comments
Re: SOE President Weighs in on Recent Security Breach Attempt
Yeah I'm not a Smedley fan either. If we all remember he started the original Everquest with the ridiculous experience curves where things like troll and dark elf Shadowknight took triple the amount of XP to level versus other characters. Friends couldn't play or level together at the same pace, and all Smedley did was call everyone a whiner and repeat his credo of "Your in my world now." SOE of course changed this silly leveling curve issue later on after Smedley moved on to other projects.
He's an ass.
Re: SOE President Weighs in on Recent Security Breach Attempt
Eh.
Keep in mind this is the very same man who once called the NGE-dissenting playerbase of SWG - over two hundred thousand people - 'minority douchebags', and ruled to push ahead with said controversial update.
The man who a year later admitted he didn't bother to listen to said playerbase in the first place, and now is pretty much responsible for the very real death of that mmo.
I'd take anything he says with several grains of salt, even if it's positive.
Re: SOE President Weighs in on Recent Security Breach Attempt
I mainly agree, but to be fair, SWG is being canned because of the contract expiring. They don't have a choice because BioWare is making The Old Republic. Which, I might add, is going to be much more awesome that SWG could ever hope to be, so that point is moot.
Atlanta Video Games Examiner for examiner.com