Hack cost $171 Mill
By Asha

Sony’s Playstation.com is among the most visited 1100 websites in the world.  The gaming site gets most of its traffic from USA following by Japan and UK.  Italy and India make up the remaining top 5 positions.  Sony has suffered at least 7 hacking attacks in the last month, and their gaming site was forced down for more than 3 weeks.

So, how much did this hacking cost Sony?  Sony has released the following statement

“
As of today, our currently known associated costs for the fiscal year ending March 2012 are estimated to be approximately 14 billion yen (US $171 Million) on the consolidated operating income level. The estimated amount includes the following items:

First, there is the current estimated cost of the personal information theft protection program for our customers. This program includes a set amount of insurance to cover a certain amount of identity theft losses that may be incurred by our customers in certain regions within a set period with respect to misuse of their personal information. To date, however, we have not confirmed such misuse of personal information.

In addition to this program cost, there are:

- Costs of welcome back programs that offer our customers certain services (such as games, music and videos) for free

- Customer support costs

- Network security enhancement costs

- Legal and expert costs, and

These amounts are our reasonable assumption based on the information currently available to Sony. So far, we have not received any confirmed reports of customer identity theft issues, nor confirmed any misuse of credit cards from the cyber-attack. Those are key variables, and if that changes, the costs could change. In addition, in connection with the data breach, class action lawsuits have been filed against Sony and certain of its subsidiaries and regulatory inquiries have begun; however, those are all at a preliminary stage, so we are not able to include the possible outcome of any of them in our results forecast for the fiscal year ending March 2012 at this moment.
“

(Techgoss had published the following on May 23, 2010)

Sony hacked once again
By Asha

Sony’s Playstation.com is among the most visited 1100 websites in the world.  The gaming site gets most of its traffic from USA following by Japan and UK.  Italy and India make up the remaining top 5 positions.  Due to a sophisticated hacking attack, the Sony Playstation Network had been crippled for more than 3 weeks.  It finally came back online on May 17.

But it seems hackers will not leave Sony alone.  Sony had announced that they needed to taken down the Playstation Network for 30 minutes on May 19 to fix another security glitch.  That was the sixth attack on Sony.

Now, a seventh attack.  Security firm Sophos has detailed how Sony BMG Greece has been hacked

“
In what seems to be a never ending nightmare it appears that the website of Sony BMG in Greece has been hacked and information dumped.

An anonymous poster has uploaded a user database to pastebin.com, including the usernames, real names and email addresses of users registered on SonyMusic.gr.

It appears someone used an automated SQL injection tool to find this flaw. It's not something that requires a particularly skillful attacker, but simply the diligence to comb through Sony website after website until a security flaw is found.
“