PSN Breached

So it has been made officially official that any PII that the PSN may have been keeping for you has been breached.  Ok, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but seeing how it has been down since what, Wednesday of last week, can you blame me?  And now they have come out to say how big the breach actually was.  Sony has engaged a private security firm to examine what they might have been taken in the attack and it was a decent amount of information:

• Name
• Address (City, State and ZIP)
• Country
• Email Address
• Birth Date
• Playstation / Qriocity Login
• Playstation / Qriocity Password
• PSN Handle / Online ID

On top of that profile data such as purchase history, billing address, and security answers could have been taken as well.  And while they have no proof that credit card numbers and expiration dates have been collected they are still advising people to check their credit reports if they kept that information on their PSN account.

So what does this mean for PSN? It is getting a strip down and rebuild.  Sony has decided instead of just patching the hole and risking something of this magnitude happening again that they are going to rebuild the system to have stronger security from the ground up.  Unfortunately this means that we are going to be out of the PSN and Qriocity services a bit longer (read: a long time).