It’s a term we think many of us used when earlier this year Sony’s Playstation Network was breached, pulled down and left more than a hundred thousand user’s credit card information exposed to theft – and now Sony is being honoured, in a fashion, by those behind the annual “Pwnie Awards” in a category entitled – “Most Epic Fail”
Most die-hard gamers, and many of our avid readers, will know that late on Wednesday 20th April 2011 the PSN mysteriously disappeared. Sony later issued a statement attributing this to “routine maintenance”. A couple days later, conscience kicked in, and Sony revealed a most disturbing truth – It’s gaming and entertainment network had been hacked and over 100,000 users personal details and bank account information had been left unsecured.
Following the intrusion, Sony issued a regular stream of falsely promising blogs in an attempt to reassure its faithful (or prevent them from joining the legion of smug Xbox 360 gamers) and save the company some face during such a painfully embarrassing affair.
On May 16th the PSN was mostly restored. Only to have the password reset process bring down the network once again when it crumpled under the weight of every user wanting to get back on their beloved PSN. It’s back now and Sony are beginning to work through the 53 pending lawsuits brought forward during “this difficult time”.
In Pwnie’s own words: “Speaking of piss in a swimming pool, that just happened to be how well Sony protected their Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) users’ account info and roughly 25 to 77 million account details were stolen by unknown hackers. That metaphor makes just about no sense at all, but you get the point: FAIL.”
It’s really hard for anyone else to top this, so there are actually no other nominees in the category of “Most Epic Fall” and the awards will be dealt out later today at the yearly Las Vegas event which attracts the world’s top hackers and online security masterminds.
Other categories in the Pwnie Awards 2011 include: Best Server-Side Bug, Lamest Vendor Response and Epic 0wnage. View all the categories and nominess at the Pwnie website – here.
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