Re: £250,000 fine for losing 77 million credit card numbers
Just a tip for the Astroturfers out there : defaulting to Anonymous destroys any credibility your postings may have.
"they were transformed using a cryptographic hash function."
Err, that is what people commonly call encryption (rightly or wrongly) with respect to password storage. Even ROT13 would qualify (despite being useless). You may not agree with the terminology but you should perhaps consider this usage before battering your keyboard.
"While the passwords that were stored were not “encrypted,”"
That does indeed seem to be the case.
"Creditcard details were encrypted and not likely taken."
That is a very weak assertion, which is no better than "we don't know - but we hope not". Either details were taken or not. If we don't know for certain then it is reasonable to conclude the security and monitoring were totally inadequate and it would be more prudent to assume the details were stolen.
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/27/qa-1-for-playstation-network-and-qriocity-services/
... and the supporting evidence for the assertion comes from an organisation affiliated to Sony that has a vested interest in keeping Playstation customers sweet on Sony.
As far as getting accurate independent evidence of credit card usage happening I very much doubt that the Credit Card companies and law enforcement authorities would publish enough details for you to accurately attribute who got whacked as a result of Sony's poor security. I doubt any such study has taken place.
This is a company that used CDs to distribute root kits on PCs. These same root kits actually impaired the lawful use of CD/DVD drives. Simply failing to secure customer details is relatively tame by Sony's usual standard of customer abuse, so perhaps they have improved on a little, but there is still no sign that they give a shit about their customers beyond taking their cash.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
