There is little doubt that the attack on the Playstation Network that has seen it being unavailable for some 6 days now has been a serious eye opener for Sony. If not, then it damn well should have been.
The fault lies purely with the hackers who instigated the attack on the network, let's make no bones about that. These mindless idiots who are out to do nothing more than cause havoc should be punished severely but there is no doubt that Sony need to do some soul searching.
The problem, as far as I am concerned, is that the PSN seems to be such a piecemeal system with near constant updates being applied to it and features being added and removed that it must be inevitable that there are some serious loopholes in the system. When compared to X Box Live it must almost be a hackers paradise. Now I am in no way saying that X Box Live is immune to attack, but can anyone remember the last time the service was down for such a long period of time due to an attack?
Of course the critical difference between the two services is that the PSN is free and X Box Live Gold is paid for. What I would like to know is how many people who only own a PS3 to play online with would have happily paid for the service and not had such a long period of downtime over the Easter weekend? I would imagine that by the time Sunday dawned, most would have been happy to see Sony adopt a more Microsoft approach to their online service.
It is easy to point to the fact that the PSN is free, but if it is going to prone to Denial of Service attacks like this then there is no point to it. Since the PS3 was cracked there have been many attacks on the PSN which has made it more unstable than it was before and now it is simply unusable. Sony maybe going all out to fix the problem, but how long will the fix work for? If there is one thing history teaches us is that hackers are extremely resourceful and very clever and if there is the slightest hint at an exploit then they will find it. What then? Does the PSN go down for the best part of a week whilst Sony reprogram huge chunks of the system? As I type there is no indication of when the service will resume so even a week might be an optimistic appraisal of the situation.
The only answer I can see is for Sony to adopt a more Microsoft style approach to their online service. I know there will be many out there who disagree, but I point to the evidence of reliability of the respective services which is something that cannot be argued against. If it means having to pay for the service then I would much rather do that than endure day after day of outage which renders a large portion of the consoles functionality redundant.
No comments:
Post a Comment