Sony Delays PlayStation Network Reactivation 317
Posted
by
timothy
from the toes-in-the-hostile-waters dept.
from the toes-in-the-hostile-waters dept.
i4u writes "Earlier this week chatter in an IRC network led to speculation of a third attack on Sony's network. For its part, the company steadfastly promised that at least some services would resume by the end of this week. But now it looks like Sony has given up on that goal. The PSN reactivation has been delayed. Sony's explanation? They were 'unaware' of the extent of the attacks on their system."
Original source (Score:4, Informative)
If you'd like to actually ready what Sony has to say for themselves instead of giving clicks to the self-promoting second-hand site: http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/05/06/service-restoration-update/ [playstation.com]
Re:Maybe that was a protest after all (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not Aware? (Score:5, Informative)
Just re-image all servers running the thing, one by one, to ensure no backdoors remain, and bring it all back up
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a perfect example of how Sony /not/ should do it.
The gentleman known as "shutdown -p now", seems to suggest that Sony should use their energy to get the servers back into a state where they can be re-breached within minutes of going back online!
Of course, this is exactly what we should expect from armchair know-it-alls. One should not trust sysadmins / system engineers who knows the situation and how to take care of it. The armchair know-it-all will scream "No! They made it this bad in the first place" - without caring one moment to think about the layer known as "management". The layer that demands that "if it works, do not touch it at all! it works! Downtime is Verboten!"
It doesn't take two weeks!
They have to: .. this is probably done within a day or two.
1. Remake installation routine
2. Reinstall servers
3. Reinstall software
4. Reload the user data
Then they have to:
5. Harden the new systems.
6. Harden the firewalls.
7. Pentest the shit out of it
8. Get it audited.
9. Re-harden, according to audit-report
10. Get audited again.
11. Repeat the two steps above until audit report is clean.
And this didn't even touch onto the huge topic of making sure that there isn't any breach of workstations that can be used to gain administrative access to the systems and so forth. It doesn't touch upon the topic of verifying user data integrity. It doesn't touch upon the topic of checking for backdoors that gains the attacker elevated access to the network, without admin privileges (but with an easier attack vector from being completely outside).
Meh!
Re:Not Aware? (Score:3, Informative)
Running up-to-date software would probably be a good start. The rest isn't rocket science either. Creating secure networks is not some esoteric art. I mean, plenty companies out there run their servers for years without having issues like that. Some even do it on *gasp* Windows servers! Maybe Sony needs to hire some of people who manage that?
There are good evidences that their servers were up to date:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1549251&postcount=491 [beyond3d.com]
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2673715&postcount=961 [quartertothree.com]
Noboby has fully assessed what happened. Nobody but the usual mythomaniac guys that crowd the big net.