Sony’s online gaming platform, The PlayStation Network (PSN), continued a five day outage on Monday after what the company described as an “attack” on its network knocked PSN offline on April 20. And hope is fading for a fast resolution, with Sony saying it is revamping the network to make it more secure. The company released a statement on their PlayStation blog on Friday claiming that an “external intrusion on our systems has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services.” The company said PSN has been turned off, and will remain off, until Sony is satisfied that their network is secure enough that this sort of thing won’t happen in the future.
While Sony did not attribute blame for the attack, published reports have speculated that the online mischief-making collective, Anonymous, might be behind the hack of Qriocity, a media streaming service that was hosted on the PlayStation Network. The group has claimed responsibility for denial of service attacks against Sony for legal attacks on hacker enthusiasts who have cracked content protection technology for its PS3 and other products.
On Friday, Anonymous posted a statement on the Web site Anonnews.org denying responsibility for the hack. “For once, we didn’t do it,” the statement read.
In a post at PlayStation’s self-help Knowledge Center, the gaming giant claims they are working around the clock to bring the network and Qriocity, their music and movie streaming service, back online. Unfortunately for a number of increasingly destitute gamers, there is little hope that the PSN will return to service anytime soon, as PlayStation says they are in the process of “rebuilding [their] system to strengthen [their] network infrastructure.”
Revelations that this outage was likely the result of an external attack aren’t altogether surprising considering the amount of ire Sony has drawn from the hacking community as a result of their legal action against suspcted PS3 hackers.
