Photo courtesy of AP
While gamers in the West have the pleasure of perusing their Playstation Network “Welcome Back” packages of free content, Japanese players will have to wait a little longer. Sony’s native government has put the kibosh on the PSN relaunch until sufficient “preventative measures” have been met. Sony met with Japan’s Ministry of Economy, as detailed in the Down Jones Newswire (credentials required).
“[We] met with Sony on May 6 and 13, and basically we want two things from them…The first is preventative measures. As of May 13, Sony was incomplete in exercising measures that they said they will do on the May 1 press conference.” relayed Kazushige Nobutani, director of media and content at the Ministry, “There were similar cases in the past that were caused by other firms, and we are asking Sony whether their measures are good enough when compared to countermeasures taken in the past.”
New details from Bloomberg offer some insight into another possible cause for the hack. According to their report, the hackers may have used Amazon’s EC2 service, which allows customers to rent servers via the retailer’s cloud-computing services, and used that as a venue to launch the attack. The day Sony revealed the network had been compromised, April 21st, was the same day Amazon’s web services went down. Amazon has yet to offer a comment on the report.
“Data security is one of these great dynamic situations where the bad guys get better, and the good guys have to keep getting better too — it’s not a static situation,” Amazon CEO JeffBezos told Fast Company about the security of the cloud after the company’s own short downtime. “I don’t think this is ever going away — it’s like trying to say that you’re going to get crime to go away.”