My senses suggest me that the theft of personal data is just a coveup story by Sony.
I think some angry hacker just wiped out their servers, and backups are as usual stored on /dev/null.
And so they have to rebuild the whole thing.
Anyway revenge is complete regardless of whom did that.
Sad that users are possibly affected as well.

I cant say I'm surprised, if they have to rebuild their network expect it to take months, this really isnt a case of patching a windows server and rebooting.

I expect one of the things keeping them offline will be the credit card companies, they are probably the ones in control right now.

Occam's Razor may apply. - I thought I read that they were running an unpatched version of Apache on a system without a firewall, including here on /. The motive could have simply been "low hanging fruit with a high return". The real question is "why the hell did it take so long for someone to pwn them?"

Assigning it to "them black hat hackers" seems akin to them blaming Anonymous. Normally, if it was done for hactivism, someone would have taken credit for it by now. The simplest explanation would appear to be that they did it to make money.

Yes, I'm sure Sony just accidentally forced hackers to break into their system. Just like when you forget to lock your doors, you are forcing someone to rob you.

Really? This is something you are berating Sony for?

They are doing the exact right thing here. First, they assessed the damage and worked to get PSN up as fast as possible. During that process, they discovered that the intrusion was more extensive than they thought, and instead of simply bringing PSN back up on their original schedule, they are allowing new information to alter their plans.

If this were some Linux archive, like for example sourceforge, or the Debian repositories, and they did the exact same thing, you'd be heaping praise upon them for doing the right thing and not adhering to bullshit corporate image demands, but since it's Sony who's doing the right thing, it must be bad somehow, right?

And something tells me you should read up on your computer forensics. Not knowing the extent of the damage immediately is common in most computer forensics investigation. At the end of the day you're simply pointing your finger at Sony without evidence or legitimate reason. Skepticism is good, criticism without reason or evidence is foolish.

Given that OtherOS was always a geek feature, there was never any support to speak of in the first place. The majority of PS users simply didn't care (and many didn't even know to care).

On the other hand, right now, Sony's image is significantly tarnished by them not being able to deal with the problem for so long. They can blame it on hackers all they want, but it's abundantly clear by now that it's also a matter of their incompetence that lead to the hack in the first place, and delays their efforts to recover. In the end, users don't really matter - all they know is that PSN is down (and will remain down, per TFA) while e.g Xbox Live works just fine.

So, as far as garnering support goes, this hack is definitely not taking any points. But as pure spiteful revenge? It's wildly successful, if you ask me.

One would assume they are also beefing up security to prevent this from happening again. Re-imaging the servers back to the state that let them get hacked in the first place is probably not sufficient. Tell you the truth I can't see how they could do anything substantial within a period of weeks to take them from the clearly messed up state they are in now to a state where people will trust their info with Sony again. Something like this should take months.. but the horde of angry gamers won't wait that long.

Indeed. That month of free access to something most people don't care about isn't gonna cut it for many. Sony is gonna have to make some serious reparations here. They've probably already lost a metric ass-tonne of customers regardless of what they do at this point, and there are probably a group of customers who don't care about this outage and will stick with playstation regardless. The larger middle angry gamer group however, they are going to need to find the right balance between cost of lost business and cost of keeping that business. Should be interesting to see what they do.

Yay, let's take revenge on the removal of OtherOS by removing the remaining features from our PlayStations, and those of all our friends! Pissing off the gaming community is sure to garner their support and goodwill!

The "gaming community"? Do you mean the petulant whiners who think George Hotz is paying his lawyers in stolen CC numbers? Or the ones who seem completely oblivious to the months of identity theft hell they're about to face because of Sony's incompetence?

Of course, leaving all that information completely unsecured would've been perfectly okay, if not for those meddling kids.

In seriousness, Sony's incompetence is borderline illegal. But, you think this is homebrew's fault?

I'd think with any complex system it would be easy to get to a state where you believe that you have figured out the extent of the damage but then later discover some damage that you missed in the intial investigation.

After discovering you missed something you would then have to do a load more investigation as to the implications of the stuff you missed.

Wow, this is a new low for Slashdot. I'm a "shill" for not being a fucking moron who thinks it's impossible for Sony to ever do anything right? When your shit gets hacked, you take it offline until you can put it back up safely. This isn't being a "shill", it's just being rational and not being a whiny little bitch just because we are supposed to hate some company.

Which has nothing to do with whether or not Sony keeping their service down for this long is right or not. I can't even fathom why the collective slashdot nerd-mind seems to think Sony would be deliberately keeping their services offline. It's utterly moronic. Sony is losing a lot of money and public image each day this continues.