Sony Doesn't Know If PlayStation Network Leaked Credit Cards

A Sony PlayStation Network gaming cloud outage that was supposed to last no more than two days has entered its fourth, with no word on when online play can resume. But worse than that, a Sony representative said in an interview with PCworld that he was unsure if the hackers who brought the Network to a halt managed to scrounge up credit card numbers or other personal information from company servers. For a cloud service provider, whether it’s oriented at serving consumers or the enterprise, that is possibly one of the worst things to tell customers.

A company blog entry made on April 24, 2011, indicated that at least part of the reason for the delay in restoring functionality was that Sony is locking down its infrastructure tight to prevent further attack. But on April 25, another blog entry said there’s no word when the PlayStation Network might be back.

That’s bad enough: The Sony PlayStation Network’s 75 million users are quickly discovering the downsides to a centralized cloud infrastructure. But now to say the company is “unsure” if personal data has been compromised is going to be seen by many as unacceptable — a cloud service provider would lose a customer if it told the customer it couldn’t tell who got into what data. It recasts the importance of cloud standards such as FISMA in a new light.

TalkinCloud can’t emphasize enough how the cloud is facing harsh judgment in the court of public opinion, with the Sony PlayStation Network and Amazon EC2 clouds both crashing. Is there hope, or has the fate of computing-as-a-service been decided?

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