Sony PlayStation Breach: A Case Study on Security Breaches

Sony PlayStation
Breach

 Security breach is basically an event that results from
an unauthorized access of data, applications,
networks or devices by way of bypassing the
underlying securities mechanisms.
 Nowadays, not only business organizations but also
the individuals make use of internet technology in
their routine life to a great extent and as a result of
which they share their private, confidential and
sensitive information on e-platform where there are
high risks of security breaches.
Security Breaches

 The issue of cyber securities has become quite
common and frequent in today’s world due to
heavy reliance on the internet. During the last few
years large number of incidents has taken place
where massive security breaches were reported.
The PlayStation breach at Sony is the classic
example of securities breach that occurred in April
2011 [3].
Security Breach at Sony

 The PlayStation network breach at Sony was
the outcome of some external intrusion of its
PlayStation Network (PSN) with the aim of
stealing the important customer data of Sony.
 When the PSN servers were hit by the Denial of
service attacks (DoS), the criminals of the said
security violation accessed the servers illegally.
The security team at Sony was busy in dealing
with the DoS attacks and hence they could not
recognize the intrusion on time.
Introduction

 It was identified by the forensic team that the attackers
had exploited a flaw in some of the Sony’s software and
deployed aggressive tactics and techniques to obtain
the network access by the illegitimate ways so as to
boost their network privileges.
 Additionally, they used sophisticated techniques to
conceal themselves from the network administrators,
such as deleting the log files.
How the breach occurred?

 On April 19, when various servers at Sony were rebooting even
without the scheduled program, the company had discovered
the fact that the data centre of the company which is located
at San Diego was hacked by some anonymous hackers who
had accessed the unauthorized data of the company that was
kept at servers of its PlayStation Network (PSN).
 It stole data from77 million users accounts of PSN server and
from the 24.5 million user accounts of Sony Online
Entertainment.
Identification of Breach