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Its seems like Sony has its work cut out for it as many online sites and journalists have been misreporting “news” regarding the events leading up to the PSN security breach and afterwards. Its difficult to fault Sony of miscommunication as these “reports” seem to crop up from unreliable sources.

There is no question that Sony faces a PR nightmare as many news sites are running rampant reports of anything that sounds sensational without questioning the validity of the source. Most of the problems stem from smaller sites looking for quick hits, but even larger sites such as CNET have been guilty of making similar mistakes.

For example CNET recently posted an article titled: “id Sony know its security was outdated?” This story was circulated via hundreds of sites across the Web like wild-fire.

According to the story Gene Spafford, a “security expert” and professor of Computer Science at Purdue University raised concerns to the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade.

He accused Sony of running outdated Apache Web servers without the latest security patches. In addition he stated that he believes that Sony did not implement firewall protection on its PSN servers. Spafford stated that his source was an Internet forum, where these topics were discussed and debated in an open forum monitored by Sony employees.

Its troubling that news sites did not question Spafford’s source and its relevancy to the PSN situation. Companies such as Sony have hundreds, if not thousands of Web servers across many business verticals (movie studios, BMG, consumer electronics, etc…. This forum debate could have been regarding a new corporate initiative or project and the discussion could have been around compatibility around xyz-infrastructure setup compatibility with xyz-software, which may not even involve confidential data.

When questioned around these accusations, Sony’s Patrick Seybold shot down these rumors by stating that PSN Web servers have been running the latest version of the security update and firewalls have been in place.

Originally posted by another user

The previous network for Sony Network Entertainment International and Sony Online Entertainment [pre-attack] used servers that were patched and updated recently, and had multiple security measures in place, including firewalls.

CNET reported this but buried it somewhere in the middle of a lengthy story titled: “Sony considers offering reward to help catch hackers.”

Unfortunately, this update was not picked up in the similar fashion as the previous story. There are smaller sites still reporting that Sony did not even have a firewall installed for the PSN servers, calling the company incompetent.

There are even sites reporting that 77 million user data was stolen. There is a difference between stolen and breach. Its incredibly dense for anyone to really think a hacker can leisurely download terabytes of an entire database with 77 million rows x nth columns from the comfort of his home. I could list out all kinds of technical limitations associated with this absurd notion, which I may save for another story.

However, that isn’t to say that not all news outlets are like this. Bitmob recently did some sleuthing of their own and discovered via Beyond3D forum, that you could easily determine what version of Apache firmware was running on the server at a specific date.

As reported by the site, Google’s brilliant Webcache shows what version of Apache the PSN servers were using back in March. According to Google’s page request archive, on March 23, 2011 Sony was running version 2.2.17 which is what Apache’s site lists as the latest stable version available today. This corroborates Patrick Seybold’s statement earlier that PSN servers have been running with the latest security firmware update.
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If your tl'dr, the article is basically on about all the PSN bashing articles, how they have no real proof and that they're just looking for cheap hits.

Nice report.

Exactly stupid reporters, They mislead allot of stuff make up bullshit just for the publicity /facepalm

I've been saying all along, Sony should keep us updated better this would put an end to most bullsh!t reporters and their bullsh!t claims!

Glad to see everyone is aware of these reporters ignorant claims.

I Hate Reporters They Always Lie About Anything They Can

we all just want psn back online z0mg

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All parties involved are full of crap.

Sony is using this hacking excuse to totally rebuild a network instead of just fixing the initial cause of it. This attack in no way affected the functionality of psn and that it has been offline this long is a total joke. Who cares if they turn the old network back on anyway, by all reports the hackers took everyones information anyway. What are they going to do, resteal it :p

I don't believe anything anyone says about psn at this point, I'll just keep waiting until Sony decides to turn the switch back on

You just can't believe the media these days.