SECURITY UPDATE



Country: USA (EN)

More Info



Press Release (https://www.soe.com/securityupdate/pressrelease.vm)
Puerto Rico Residents (https://www.soe.com/securityupdate/puertorico.vm)
Massachusetts Residents (https://www.soe.com/securityupdate/massachusetts.vm)


As previously announced, we have been conducting an ongoing, thorough investigation stemming from the cyber attack in April and promised to notify you should there be any changes to the situation.

A press release was issued May 2, 2011 outlining these details. We are sending customer service notifications via email to all of our impacted account holders whose customer data may have been stolen as a result of an illegal intrusion on our systems. These emails will be sent by Innovyx, our third party email distributor, and will contain either 'soe.innovyx.net' or 'soe.sony.com' in the sender field.

SOE is committed to delivering secure, stable and entertaining games for players of all ages and we're working around the clock to ensure this situation is resolved as quickly as possible. We deeply regret the inconvenience this has caused and appreciate your continued patience and feedback.

Sincerely,
Sony Online Entertainment

CUSTOMER SERVICE NOTIFICATION

May 2, 2011

Dear Valued Sony Online Entertainment Customer:
Our ongoing investigation of illegal intrusions into Sony Online Entertainment systems has discovered that hackers may have obtained personal customer information from SOE systems. We are today advising you that the personal information you provided us in connection with your SOE account may have been stolen in a cyber-attack. Stolen information includes, to the extent you provided it to us, the following: name, address (city, state, zip, country), email address, gender, birthdate, phone number, login name and hashed password.

Customers outside the United States should be advised that we further discovered evidence that information from an outdated database from 2007 containing approximately 12,700 non-US customer credit or debit card numbers and expiration dates (but not credit card security codes) and about 10,700 direct debit records listing bank account numbers of certain customers in Germany, Austria, Netherlands and Spain may have also been obtained. We will be notifying each of those customers promptly.
There is no evidence that our main credit card database was compromised. It is in a completely separate and secured environment.
We had previously believed that SOE customer data had not been obtained in the cyber-attacks on the company, but on May 1st we concluded that SOE account information may have been stolen and we are notifying you as soon as possible.
We apologize for the inconvenience caused by the attack and as a result, we have:
1) Temporarily turned off all SOE game services;
2) Engaged an outside, recognized security firm to conduct a full and complete investigation into what happened; and
3) Quickly taken steps to enhance security and strengthen our network infrastructure to provide you with greater protection of your personal information.
We greatly appreciate your patience, understanding and goodwill as we do whatever it takes to resolve these issues as quickly and efficiently as practicable.
For your security, we encourage you to be especially aware of email, telephone, and postal mail scams that ask for personal or sensitive information. Sony will not contact you in any way, including by email, asking for your credit card number, social security number or other personally identifiable information. If you are asked for this information, you can be confident Sony is not the entity asking. When SOE's services are fully restored, we strongly recommend that you log on and change your password. Additionally, if you use your Station or SOE game account name or password for other unrelated services or accounts, we strongly recommend that you change them, as well.
To protect against possible identity theft or other financial loss, we encourage you to remain vigilant, to review your account statements and to monitor your credit reports. We are providing the following information for those who wish to consider it:

U.S. residents are entitled under U.S. law to one free credit report annually from each of the three major credit bureaus. To order your free credit report, visit www.annualcreditreport.com (http://www.annualcreditreport.com/) or call toll-free (877) 322-8228.
We have also provided names and contact information for the three major U.S. credit bureaus below. At no charge, U.S. residents can have these credit bureaus place a "fraud alert" on your file that alerts creditors to take additional steps to verify your identity prior to granting credit in your name. This service can make it more difficult for someone to get credit in your name. Note, however, that because it tells creditors to follow certain procedures to protect you, it also may delay your ability to obtain credit while the agency verifies your identity. As soon as one credit bureau confirms your fraud alert, the others are notified to place fraud alerts on your file. Should you wish to place a fraud alert, or should you have any questions regarding your credit report, please contact any one of the agencies listed below.
Experian: 888-397-3742; www.experian.com (http://www.experian.com/); P.O. Box 9532, Allen, TX 75013
Equifax: 800-525-6285; www.equifax.com (http://www.equifax.com/); P.O. Box 740241, Atlanta, GA 30374-0241
TransUnion: 800-680-7289; www.transunion.com (http://www.transunion.com/); Fraud Victim Assistance Division, P.O. Box 6790, Fullerton, CA 92834-6790
You may wish to visit the web site of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission at www.consumer.gov/idtheft (http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft) or reach the FTC at 1-877-382-4357 or 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20580 for further information about how to protect yourself from identity theft. Your state Attorney General may also have advice on preventing identity theft, and you should report instances of known or suspected identity theft to law enforcement, your State Attorney General, and the FTC. For North Carolina residents, the Attorney General can be contacted at 9001 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699-9001; telephone (877) 566-7226; or www.ncdoj.gov (http://www.ncdoj.gov/). For Maryland residents, the Attorney General can be contacted at 200 St. Paul Place, 16th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21202; telephone: (888) 743-0023; or www.oag.state.md.us (http://www.oag.state.md.us/).
We are committed to helping our customers protect their personal data and we will provide a complimentary offering to assist users in enrolling in identity theft protection services and/or similar programs. The implementation will be at a local level and further details will be made available shortly in regions in which such programs are commonly utilized.
We thank you for your patience as we complete our investigation of this incident, and we regret any inconvenience. Our teams are working around the clock on this, and services will be restored as soon as possible. Sony takes information protection very seriously and will continue to work to ensure that additional measures are taken to protect personally identifiable information. Providing quality and secure entertainment services to our customers is our utmost priority. Please contact us at 1 (866) 436-6698 should you have any additional questions.
Sincerely,
Sony Online Entertainment LLC

This is not a drill. Please walk calmly to your previously designated safety area. If you used any card you currently use to purchase stuff with soe, change it. If you used a password on a sony game in any other facet of your online existence, change it. Sigh.

EQ is down. Sony website is down. Their entire online infrastructure is down, and the above message is what you get if you try to go to any sony website.

Truth be told, they didn't lose any US based personal information. Not that it was a good thing, nor should folks not be extremely vigilant, but none the less it was entirely from their European guys.

No no, they copped to losing serious peices of the US database as well...

name, address (city, state, zip, country), email address, gender, birthdate, phone number, login name and hashed password.

I believe the larger breach that included US information was PSN data, not SoE data. There was lots of talk about what happened here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2486924

I still don't buy it that they didn't lose any credit card information, I just had two small fraudulent charges pop up on my checking account

Clipped the card and in the process of changing my accounts. Fuck SOE

Aside from the credit card thing a much more serious problem is that anyone who had the same email and password on their SOE/PSN stuff and anything else may have been exposed for a long time now. Even hashed passwords under about 9 characters or with lots of non-letter characters are no defense against modern Rainbow dictionaries. What's worse, the PSN network and much of Sony's internal customer records were functionally unprotected FOR YEARS, it simply became impossible to ignore when literally anyone could get their developer console access.

This is one reason I hate hate hate all those stupid sites that force you to make accounts to buy things. Even if Sony didn't lose your CC, they just gave up your email and one of gamer's most frequently used passwords, that is at least highly similar to one they likely use elsewhere with equally direct access to money.

I still don't buy it that they didn't lose any credit card information, I just had two small fraudulent charges pop up on my checking account

Clipped the card and in the process of changing my accounts. Fuck SOE

I had "test" charges on mine. Less than a dollar withdraw and then credits. Changing my information as well. My account info is on 2 EQ accounts and 2 PSN accounts.....I hate this....

Thankfully other than E-mail spam i'll be protected as the account that was tied to my station account was defunct as of 2005.
This is the main reason that instead of having a recurring subscription to WoW i choose to use game cards. sure you can hack my account but cannot get my bank info.

Still down, this is the longest EQ's been down in the 10 years i've been around it. I think for once, people are actually venturing outside. This could be a good thing for the human race.

The bad thing is they knew they were vulnerable and just ignored it. I have doubts if they will recover quickly or if they will recover at all. There are allot of spurned people out there and this is going to cost them a shitton.

Rift is having a pretty steady flux of new players from this issue. Depending on how long it takes them to get up and running I wonder what the long-term decline for SOE will be.

Its events like these that make one think that its time to shift a huge percentage of daily life back to being offline. Too much sensitive financial and personal information just ripe for some 12 year old 4chan troglodyte to ponce on when not PKing my lvl 20 WoW rogue or jerking off to midget porn. Nothing like good ole CASH used to pay for something at a STORE in TOWN that I got from a real TELLER at a BANK.

It's not the kids, Lum, organized crime has been all over this stuff for 10 years. Frequently they use stolen financial information for money laundering purposes as well as petty theft. I've seen LE estimates that some Russia crime families get more money from wire fraud than prostitution and drug trafficking now.

It doesn't make it any less scary.

Sounds like they're back up, and free for the next 40 days or so, is that right?

Yup. Double exp/faction/rare spawns.

Personally I think Sony handled it right. I still remember having my NCSoft account hacked.....despite not having used it in the better part of a year. NCSoft never did owe up to it. I had to threaten legal action if they didn't delete the account. Lucky for me, I'd shut down the credit card on file. I'll never play one of their products again, period.

apparently the PSN password reset page got hacked today LOL.......again!

It didn't really get hacked, but the data necessary to reset an account's password was in the leaked data. So, all those compromised accounts could be re-compromised through the normal reset process.