Sony to Restore PSN Fully By May End Hopefully

The Sony PSN and Qriocity saga continues as the company have just discovered a third leak in the system. The company said that they have received yet another setback, this time around involving those entrants in a products sweepstakes competition.

In the line of fire...

This attack involves 2500 entrants in a product sweepstakes contest which took place in 2001 and their personal information could be breached. However, no credit card information, passwords or Social Security numbers were included in the data.

Chief research officer of anti-virus firm F-Secure, Mikko Hypponen, in an email on Monday told SCMagazineUS.com that while probing public Sony servers, independent Japanese researchers discovered the sweepstakes information breach after learning about the earlier information leaks. He went on to say that what they had found was an old sweepstakes server and that this server had some of its scripts readable by anyone and it was easy to deduce where this information was saved. Hyponnen went on to say that this information was not stolen and posted online by hackers but the information was mistakenly posted by Sony employees to one of the company’s own public servers. This file has been removed upon discovery.

As reported by Bloomberg, Sony’s spokesman Shigenori Yoshida said that as of now the service will remain shut and that Sony is uncertain as to when it would be resumed. He also added  that the company is in the process of adopting an improved security system and its plan to restart the services fully by May 31st remains unchanged.

However, according to Dean Takahashi with VentureBeat, the above was not true and that Sony hasn’t said it will take until May 31st to fix PSN.

For those affected by the outage Sony has given users some reason to smile with Head of Communications, Nick Caplin offering two PS3 games from a list of five as well as two PSP games from a list of four. The best news is that these games will be free.

For more information on the PSN outage click here.