Playstation Network Problems
On April 17, 2011 the Playstation Network was hacked exposing the personal account information of 77 million users. This prevented users of the Playstation 3 as well as PSP from online activity. This problem lasted for approximately 23 days. Sony claimed that the playstation users data was compromised long before they were able to detect a breach. Credit Card information is encrypted over the Playstation Network, but other personal details are not and therefore were vulnerable.
The attack on the network was in accordance to the Sony servers being taken offline the previous day, and therefore the Network was susceptible to a hack. George Hotz is the alleged hacker and he was able to do this by enabling himself read and write access as well as having hypervisor level access to the processor. He used a Playstation 2 emulator which had been removed by Sony from the current console. In addition he also created a custom firmware. It requires the OtherOS function of the machine, and consists of a linux kernel model and gaining control of the systems hyperdriver via bus glitching.
Playstation 3 had a feature that would update firmware and delete the OtherOS function but this was absent from the newer, slimmer models. Due to the fact that Linux is foreign to the PS3 network it made it more difficult to resolve and remove the custom firmware. Hotz had run a "homebrew" application on his own PS3 similar to the Iphone jailbreaking technique by reviewing the jailbreak of the Iphone, Sony gained assistance in solving the problem. They also hired various experts to set up firewalls and basically abolish the custom firmware.
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