Sony took a deliberate move to shut down their PlayStation because of an external intrusion which targeted to cause a denial of service to their client. This fatal attack took place in mid April 2010. According to Molina (2011), the attacker intended to affect the entire Sony PlayStation network. The Sony Corporation decided to shut down both the entertainment service Qriocity and the PSN. The move was taken to facilitate room for in-depth investigation to ensure secure and smooth running of the PlayStation (Molina, & Down, 2011).
The whole issue started when the network of the Sony PlayStation started to become unresponsive to the users when they tried to log into the system. The issue was persistent for three days. The attack was later identified as an external attack by some group of online masquerading crusaders. The Sony Corporation had to provide its critical services to the customers on an offline basis for some time as they try to find a specific vulnerable point which the attackers exploited.
The way Sony gave the news to their clients was not appropriate. This would potentially make the customers to believe that a corporation has failed in ensuring that the clients get high quality services. It would also affect the reputation of the company. The management would have handled the issue in a more professional way so that confidence is restored on the customers.
External intrusion entails various Man-in-the-Middle Attack where the attackers operating on the networks with the intension of modifying the information or data on transit. There are four prevalent types of external attacks; denial of service attack and compromised-key attack. Denial-of-Service Attack involves all the attacks that are driving at stopping the user of the system or even the network from getting the intended service. Example is ram scraper; this is a program or virus that targets the data that is contained in the ram with the intention of modifying it before being processed and completely deleting it. This form of attack can be prevented by use of very powerful antivirus which can disintegrate the program. On the other hand, a compromised-Key Attack, for example authentication, bypasses methods where he or she can get access to the system without having to enter the authentication credentials. This can be through a different IP address that routes the attacker via other links until he get access to the same system. Broken Authentication and Session Management though taken as less sensitive attack can be disastrous if the involved crucial data such as financial data (Sangani, 2011).
Considering the time taken by the Sony forensic expert to uncover the whole ordeal, I believe that it was too much. This is because it is simpler to uncover the source of an external intrusion. There is various state-of-the-art security software which can be used to monitor any network traffic or users. The software gives a log of all the users and how they behave while using the network. When the monitoring system realizes any change in the behaviour, it signals the network security officer instantly so that the mitigation measures can be established within the shortest time possible. Moreover, I think Sony corporation network security team did not put into consideration the importance of having a well defined network security risk plan. The effective ways of identifying any security vulnerability would have been integrated in the plan (Sangani, 2011).
References
Molina, I., & Down, N. S. (2011) Sony PlayStation Network Attacked.
Sangani, K. (2011). Sony security lay bare. Engineering & Technology, 6(8), 74-77.
