Heyyyy! Any of you ever play SOE games?Follow

More info here.

http://www.zam.com/forum.html?forum=22&mid=1303958011125432678&page=1

Luckily I've never actually subscribed to any, so my CC info is safe. And I already lost my email and such from the PSN hack.

Haha, and truthfully it's only a week or so old. It's a pretty big deal - a friend of mine had his CC info stolen, and this is the most likely explanation.

I was just about to join so I could get dino crisis, now I have to wait.

It sounds like the most they made off with was names, addresses and possibly some really old Euro CC info -



This is about their PC games though. Not sure if this also applies to PSN.

I dunno. I heard it affdected all SOE and even EQ2 has been shut down indefinitely =(

I've been playing everquest and eq2 off and on since beta. Just switched all my cards over in case. I am definitly not thrilled about this. I see SOE getting sued out of existance as a very real possibility too, which could mean the end of everquest as we know it entirely. Sure an outside hacker was to blame, but somewhere along the line, someone at SOE had to have ****** up to an incredible degree to have even allowed this to occur.

I haven't played an SOE game in so long, I'm pretty sure any CC info they might have taken is expired by now.

The bad PR alone would be bad enough but today I've read that McPhadden Samac Tuovi, a Toronto law firm, has proposed a class action lawsuit against Sony Japan, Sony USA and Sony Canada for breach of privacy. The lawsuit claims damages in excess of $1 billion, including the cost of credit monitoring services and fraud insurance for those affected for two years.
Sued out of existence indeed

I saw a lengthy article detailing why a class action lawsuit is actually essentially pointless in this case.

In a class action suit, you actually need to give adequate evidence of damages. That's nearly impossible in this case--how do you quantify how much your name, email and address are worth? The credit cards are obviously worse, but it works in Sony's favor that the database they lost was from 07/08 or something. Few of those are still valid.

And the fact remains that it is quite easy to cancel those cards and request a new one. So a court isn't going to really care. It isn't like it was a database of SSNs that was lost.

On top of that, you need to prove that Sony's actually liable for the breach, which is going to be incredibly difficult. No system is unbreakable as long as it is connected to a network--it's a crappy truth about the world. Unless there's a clear sign of negligence somewhere, a court probably isn't going to hold Sony responsible.

Really, the strongest claim people actually have is that Sony's delay in alerting customers might have compromised some subscribers further. But that's still not something that you can really quantify into actual damages.

Now add in the fact that they've brought in gov't agencies and private security firms to investigate the attack, and it's going to be even harder to make a case against them. Especially since neither of them are likely to publicly state that Sony was at fault, and why, to the public.

Finally, afaik, the PSN and SOE hacks were actually separate attacks that happened at the same time (and those two databases are separate entities). That lends support to Sony's claim, as their resources were spread thin right from the start in dealing with multiple breaches. It also suggests that the attackers were a large, well-equipped group, such that they could manage such a huge job.

Realistically, their biggest concern at this point is PR. Which is significant in and of itself. The fact that they have some of the worst I've seen won't to help their case. They should have alerted customers no later than the day after they confirmed a hack.



The minute I found out, I enabled a 2-step login on my gmail. Luckily, I've been in a slow process over the past few months of changing all my passwords anyway, so few of them are the same as my PSN password.

Edited, May 4th 2011 7:41pm by idiggory

But what can they actually do with them? All of Sony's services are down, and users are being forced to change their passwords when they come back up.

You're only in trouble if you use the same password for multiple things. And if you haven't changed them by now...

You'd be amazed at how many people use the same passwords. And not everyone follows the news about games they played ten years ago.

Well, my SOE password is different from any other password, so I'm not worried about them figuring it out somehow and getting into my other stuff. Also, my bank password isn't the same as any other password.

I've not seen any weird emails or an increase in spam yet either.