PSN Failure: Can They Recover?
By Yanngc33 27 Comments
As of today, the recent PSN outage has gone from nuisance to disaster. Right now, your personal information may be out in the open, ready to be taken by a malevolent hacker. Who would've known that downloading your favorite downloadables would end up potentially costing you more money than you bargained for? Let me tell you who's having a field day with this one: Nintendo. If only Sony didn't save your credit card information, if only each and every time you wanted to download something you had to type in all those numbers, maybe a disaster like this would not have happened.
But what is done is done. Sony has admitted that some aspects of the situation are out of their control and now the user must step in to clean up their mess. I mean, they're asking you to order a free credit report. They're telling people what numbers they must call if they want to maybe avoid a potential financial disaster, said numbers belonging to the government and banks. Sony is helpless, it has lost control, control it never really had. From the beginning this has been a PR disaster, much like a year ago when all "fat" PS3s broke down. They've been slow to respond and haven't offered any sort of solutions or compensation. And for that, shame on you Sony.
Of course, Sony will pull out of this. The hackers will be found and tried. The PSN will rise from its own ashes and after a 3 hour long firmware update, everything will be back to normal. But at what cost? The PS3 has had a very rough year (so far), hackers finding loopholes in what used to be an impregnable fortress. They are under constant attack, be it from the pricks who call themselves Anonymous, or from independent hackers like Hotz. With this most recent breach into the system, which will probably lead to a 2 week PSN outage, consumers around the globe have seen the dark side of ordering things online, the one thing they feared the most the first time they entered their credit card number into a computer, that thing being credit card fraud. And today, in many people's minds, the Playstation Network is not a reliable service.
So what can Sony do to recover from this?
S.O.S PSN
- Marketing Blitz: Sony puts a huge sum of money into building a new image, promoting user friendly services, focusing on security. This would require good PR.
- Hire Hotz: Sony would have to bite the bullet on this one. Despite probably despising the man who ruined their system's security, he may hold the key to building better firmware to avoid this kind of thing ever happening again.
- Eliminate Anonymous: Sony is a major company spanning multiple continents. It should have no problem destroying these self declared Robin Hoods.
- Rewrite Everything: Sony could rewrite the entire firmware, making a new OS with new security. All they would have to do is eliminate the old one like they eliminated certain features on the console.
What do you think? Is there any way Sony can come out on top?