Sony has reportedly faced a security breach which resulted in millions of PS3 IDs being leaked to the hackers. This is thought to be the reason behind lots of PS3 users reporting in the PSN forums that they were banned for no reason whatsoever, according to reporting from Sportskeeda.
While there is not enough evidence to ratify the claim, it does not seem too far-fetched considering the circumstantial evidence at hand. There has been a significant influx of reports by PS3 users in PSN forums recently, regarding them being banned for no apparent reason.
Hackers are suggesting this might be the result of a data breach that left a list with all the serial ID numbers of all Sony’s PS3 consoles. Sony allegedly didn’t have stringent security measures in place to prevent a breach like this.
“This attack doesn’t appear to be particularly sophisticated,” said Michael Barragry, operations lead at Edgescan. “However, the impact on users looks to be significant“, Barragry added.
According to Barragry, even though it was only a list of Serial IDs of consoles that was leaked, a malicious user could easily automate a script to simulate these consoles being jailbroken, which results in a user ban.
“It’s an example of a breach of data which is effectively anonymised, but can still be abused to effect users indiscriminately,” he concluded.