ACCG822 Information Systems in Business - Cyber security

Running Head: SONY PLAYSTATION CYBER ATTACK
Sony PlayStation Cyber Attack
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1SONY PLAYSTATION CYBER ATTACK
Table of Contents
Introduction..........................................................................................................................2
a. Details of the Sony PlayStation Cyber Attack...........................................................2
b. Implications that lies behind the attack of Sony PlayStation....................................5
c. Cyber Security Policies and Procedures for Sony PlayStation Cyber Attack...........7
d. Review on Cyber Security.......................................................................................11
Conclusion.........................................................................................................................11
References..........................................................................................................................12

2SONY PLAYSTATION CYBER ATTACK
Introduction
A cyber attack was faced by the Sony PlayStation on 11th April in the year 2011. The data
breach hacked all the personal details of at least seventy seven million users and their access was
also lost (Garrie and Mann 2014). The personal details that were lost included the user name of
the customers, their residential addresses, email addresses, date of births, passwords of
PlayStation and their usernames. The profile data of PlayStation, their history of purchase and
their billing addresses with all the security questions were also hacked. The worse situation was
that Sony was not able to understand if the details of their customer’s credit cards were also
breached or not. All the details of case is stated in this report.
This report elaborates the details of the Sony PlayStation cyber attack. It gives a detail
view on the scenario including the time line, the person mainly responsible for the data breach
and the company’s response related to the data breach. It also deals with the implications of the
cyber security attack that was faced by Sony. The related policies and the procedures that can be
initiated by the company to mitigate the attack on the cyber space of Sony PlayStation. And
lastly a personal review is given what is cyber security about and a clear review on cyber
security.
a. Details of the Sony PlayStation Cyber Attack
Scenario including timeline
Six years before from now, in the year 2011 PlayStation Network of Sony Company
faced a data breach which hacked all the personal details of at least seventy seven million users
and their access was also lost (Shackelford, Fort and Charoen 2016). This data breach of hacking
the data of PlayStation was considered as the largest hacking that was ever faced by the gamers
in the world. The impact of the data breach that happened resulted in- as short term impact to
stop access of all the online services of PlayStation for weeks and as long term impact Sony had
to gain the trust of the customer back.
The story began with the hacktivist group that was umbrella termed which made the
attack on Sony PlayStation with DDOS (Distributed Denial of Services) attacks. The attack had

3SONY PLAYSTATION CYBER ATTACK
made the PlayStation of Sony to come down to its knees several times in the year 2011, April to
privacy breach (Kirsch 2014). The PlayStation 3 of Sony was hacked by George Hotz, an
American developer on 2nd January 2011. Sony made unforgiveable legal actions against Hotz
which made the anonymous very upset. The anonymous group said that the information which
Hotz gave was very useful about how to run games that were pirated, way of running homebrew
software. The anonymous group declared that they were stopping the attack as because their
intension was not to attack the gamers of the Sony PlayStation (Prakash and Dasgupta 2016).
Their main motive was only to attack Sony. But again on April 19 2011, PlayStation was again
hit by the group of anonymous people. This time the attack was more dangerous.
After two days of the attack, Sony got to know that the attack was done and declared the
PlayStation as offline. On April 21, Sony tweeted to all its users that the PlayStation was facing
some of the problems regarding the online network services and it will remain unavailable until
further notice (Chatfield and Reddick 2017). They also said that their support teams were
investigating the problem cause which included all the outside parties. Their engineers are trying
to solve the problems as soon as possible and regain the services. After working for five days
Sony declared that the PlayStation would not come online for three weeks more. The customers
could not come online before 48 hours as was declared by Sony (Gupta, Vashisht and Singh
2016). The next day, on 24th April, Sony again apologized for the time it is taking to regain and
declared that a severe problem has taken place and investigations are going on regarding its
network. Sony has not confirmed that the personal data of their customers were at risk. A week
after the outage, Sony came to know the actual cause of the problem they were facing (Watkins
et al. 2015). The engineers of Sony kept on working for hours and their customers were
reassured continuously. On 26th April, Sony finally declared about the data breach that has
actually taken place. They announced that the personal data, credit card number of millions of
people were lost. Sony admitted that they were still investigating on the incident and are trying to
resolve the problem as soon as possible.
Responsible for occurrence data breach
The personal details that were lost included the user name of the customers, their
residential addresses, email addresses, date of births, passwords of PlayStation and their
usernames (Rao, Chen and Dhillon 2014). The profile data of PlayStation, their history of