It’s been a strange week for Sony, being involved in one of the heaviest publicized data-losses of this year (decade?) when hackers broke into vulnerable user information databases. Initially, it took them almost six days to come forward with the breach and as a result they took the entire PlayStation Network offline; then, after a week of that they discovered that Sony Online Entertainment had also suffered as part of the breach. The original emissions from the company suggested that their credit-card information was not revealed, but when they discovered SOE’s data loss they revealed that credit card numbers had been taken.
This is what we know so far about the breach itself: it happened because Sony was running outdated, unpatched Apache Web server software without a firewall [consumerist.com]. This suggests that at least part of the PlayStation Network compromised runs with the LAMP stack; but that’s definitely not going to be an underlying network technology (at least not in my universe.)
Other details are extremely sketchy.
It seems to us voces that Sony’s networks might just be a hodgepodge of different technology layers that differ between their separate holdings. Sony’s PlayStation Network may have a main hub through which they run all of their data in order to connect to their various arms; but they’ve been through so many developments that it might just be a series of separate realms welded together at the center. The fact that an unpatched Apache server was only two firewall hops away from a credit card database certainly lends some credibility to that.
Still, we’re wondering… A multitude of networks now offload some of their processing power into the cloud (networks of data centers across the Internet to stream and process information.) In fact, PSN Plus subscribers receive the benefit of cloud-storage for their trophies and game saves [engadget.com], but it’s unlikely that this network is involved in connecting and maintaining everyday gaming. Other gaming services do run with Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud-based computing, such as Xbox Live which runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
Does anyone know what PlayStation Network happens to run as its underlying technology?
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