Sony: PSN hack to cost approximately $170m

Ouch. So next time it happens a career criminal will tell them they have the data and for a bargain of $85m they can have it back. Better to hush it up rather than spend another $170m....

Posted:A year ago

Umm, what? A $4bn turnaround primarily due to writing off deferred tax assets? That is a ultra-major writeoff - that can't be good for investors, knowing such a big change can be due to that. Currency related maybe, same thing Nintendo did (2?) quarters ago?

Posted:A year ago

How do you quantify a loss in consumer confidence in your platform? Between that and the hardcore COD-head exodus that was reported last week there is bound to be more long lasting effects into the future.

Posted:A year ago

That's correct, Michael. Currency exchange write offs can play hell with your financial reports (they can also bolster them) and that is why Nintendo was in the red 2 quarters ago. Nintendo actually had profit of $500 million profit that quarter.

This being a one time write off for Sony seems similar. Instead of being about a currency exchange write off, it's deferred tax assets. Sony should also report to investors the FY figures before the write off....unless that's still in the red. Knowing actual figures without the one time impact will give investors a better idea of the health of the company.

Posted:A year ago

It has not quite been the "Year of the Playstation" so far.

Posted:A year ago

170m is a very small price to pay for a business as big as Sony. They could have lost 20 times that and still survived well. What they forget is the lost userbase from console migration, the reduced revenue that psn will generate due to lost confidence, and the alarming wake up call they should be getting after being shown for the second time that their security sucks!

Posted:A year ago

Andrew bad security if you build it a hacker will hack it, their is no security safe they let a guy use a ps3 to hack their goverment computer thats a WTF and so you say bad security I say no security is safe from a hacker so think before you say something

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Chester Taylor on 23rd May 2011 6:53pm

Posted:A year ago

Aye chester, a determined hacker with the right skills probly will get round anything eventually.

but not updating your firewall and server software is sucky security anyway you paint it, and to be honest, someone with a bit of knowledge could with a tutorial to hacking old server/firewall software could of probly pulled off this attack, which is a sorry state of affairs, truth be told.

Posted:A year ago

Aye chester, a determined hacker with the right skills probly will get round anything eventually.

but not updating your firewall and server software is sucky security anyway you paint it, and to be honest, someone with a bit of knowledge could with a tutorial to hacking old server/firewall software could of probly pulled off this attack, which is a sorry state of affairs, truth be told.

Posted:A year ago

Chester, if that is the case then Sony have the worst luck in the world. I mean this, the Ps3 firmware, the PSP, So-Net ( http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY20110521... ).

All whilst MS and Nintendo still have impenetrable software.

And you're wrong, you can make a virtually impenetrable piece of software, you just end up spending huge amounts of CPU time encrypting and decrypting.

Posted:A year ago

And you're wrong, you can make a virtually impenetrable piece of software, you just end up spending huge amounts of CPU time encrypting and decrypting.

No you can't. Encryption is only a small part of security and, while difficult, is not the most difficult part. The real challenge is to come up with a complete system that's hard to exploit from any location within it.

Posted:A year ago

All whilst MS and Nintendo still have impenetrable software.

Bwuh? So the Wii and 360 hacks from years upon years ago were figments of my imagination? And the entire business model of R4-like cartridges for the DS?

Posted:A year ago

@ Christopher if you read closely, I used software for a reason. Without hardware modification, all current non-portable consoles from MS and nintendo cannot be easily circumvented. I was speaking more about flashing the software with replacement OS's etc like the X

The modern 360 is immune to the 'King Kong' hacks of today. I will admit that I had forgotten the R4 though.

Posted:A year ago