So I am sure by now you may have heard about the trouble Sony is having. Hackers took down PSN on April 19th. As of this writing on the night of the 26th it is still down and the news got a lot worse today. My intention is to give you my view of the incident and what I think you as a gamer should take from it. The best place to start this discussion is with just what exactly happened.

From everything I have read this attack and subsequent downing of PSN was in response to the whole Geohotz hacking case. Which as you recall was settled out of court recently. All we knew up until today was that PSN an Quorcity had been taken offline and that Sony was working to fix the issue. Now news has come out that the hackers have obtained at least the names,addresses and login of PSN users. While speculation still runs wild on whether any or not this also meant financial information. This news to me changes the scope of the incident and I don’t care what anyone else says in that regard.

You see when it was just hackers taking PSN offline in an attempt to teach Sony a lesson that was one thing. They all got to feel good about themselves and get even with the big evil corporation. Normally that barely even gets a yawn out of me. As Glasenator always say’s “hackers going to be hacking”. Even the supposed experts lick my buddy Pachter have said the intent behind this attack wasn’t malicious. I’m sorry, but any time sensitive user data is exposed to people who might use it for personal gain their intent becomes malicious to me. Personally I highly doubt the hackers needed to go that far in to Sony’s database if their intent was to just take PSN offline for a few days. As far as I am concerned the attackers went a step beyond internet vandalism when they started accessing that type of information. While nobody has a clue who was behind the attack at this point, you can bet I won’t be shedding a tear if they are caught and prosecuted. Given what Sony did with the Geohotz affair, I would suspect they will take anyone they can tie to this disaster to court. Speaking of Sony, let’s now move to how they have handled this crisis.

I suppose from the point of view of a PSN user, they haven’t handled to brilliantly when you consider the total scope of the mess. Being that I don’t own a PS3 or use PSN I have a bit different perspective on the matter. I do feel a lot of sympathy for my fellow gamers who own a PS3 and use the PSN regularly. All gamers know how it feels when we can’t fully access our gaming platform of choice. As to Sony itself I am not quite yet ready to throw them under the bus. By all accounts they seem to be doing everything in their power to bring PSN back online and better than it was before. That leaves us with the whole user data question. While there was nothing they could do about the extent of the damage the hackers did, they must be very careful with how they handle the PR. As of right now it appears they have been upfront with giving users all the information they need to protect themselves from potential harm. According to Sony they knew about the PSN breach on the 19th and learned that user information had been compromised on the 25th. If that is true then they have been upfront and given user a chance to keep the attackers from accessing any credit card accounts. I know my twitter feed was filled with folks doing just that today. So far I haven’t head of any unauthorized use of cards, but we may not hear about any of that for another day or two. Right now I am willing to give Sony the benefit of the doubt, but I know many people aren’t. People being cynical about Sony’s honesty is to be expected and I won’t drop over dead from shock if we find out they are lying.

If nothing else Sony is in for a long nightmare filled road in the PR department. No matter how honest and forth coming they are a lot of gamers will have a hard time trusting them as we move forward. I can’t say I blame them. Things will only get worse if user credit cards or other private information are used by the people responsible for the attack. That will no doubt lead to legal battles and more bad PR. if the fall out from the 2008 “outage” of Xbox Live is any indication. Now the question becomes what can gamers/consumers take away from all of this.

The first thing I would say is that once Sony cleans up it’s mess they will probably be the safest service to use for quite a while after that. I know that sounds insane, but just stop and think about it for a second. Sony just got burned big time and it’s in there best interest to regain the public’s trust as fast as possible. That means being very cautious and through on how they run PSN in the future. I am not saying it will always be that way, but I am betting it’s going to a lot tougher to hack than it was the first time. Which brings me to the Xbox and PC fanboy’s which I am sure have been laughing at Sony fan’s while this has been going on. You had better be very careful when it comes to talking smack about something like this. Because if it happened to Sony it can happen to Microsoft or Steam. In fact I do believe Valve already got hacked once a number of years back. I can guarantee you we won’t be enjoying ourselves if the shoe ever ends up on the other foot. Granted asking idiots to not use this as fodder for the inane console wars, is like asking a lion not to eat a baby.