From June 18 to June 19, a ton of PlayStation 3s received the banhammer.

The reason behind this is that the affected players’ consoles’ ID was used in a large-scale hacking operation, and the personal data are still publicly available on the internet. This is not a good situation for Sony, and let’s keep it at that.

Here’s a PSNProfiles post that recaps most of it: „Back in April, this video [embedded below] was posted on YouTube talking about the leak. It’s in Spanish.  Since then, I have seen an increase in people saying they have been banned when they have done nothing. Also seen people saying they have seen an increase in people selling PlayStation 3 IDs for cheap.

The main thing I’m seeing and hearing is the response from Sony is the console was banned for hacking and exploiting. So basically their PlayStation 3 IDs are used, probably for online hacking and the console was banned.  This has just happened to me now, tried to sign in and it says the console has been banned or temporarily suspended. My account is fine I can log in on my other PlayStation 3, but my main PS3 has got a ban. I signed in fine about 2 hours ago and all I did was use Netflix.

This is very worrying, if it’s true that console IDs have been leaked then over the next few months I think we will see a huge increase in this happening, I can’t think of what Sony could do to stop this issue?  If it’s not a console ID leak then what the hell is going on?”, the post reads.

A forum post on GameFAQs explains a bit more: „Apparently, the hacking community found a list with all the serial ID numbers of all Sony’s PlayStation 3 consoles. Remember the security’s breach or PSN hack back in 2011? It’s [that] all over again…

The thing is that the ID numbers weren’t very secured by Sony, there wasn’t any „encrypted” data or any very complex computational security lock or something with the ID numbers info, it was on a simple „folder” (or at least that was the guy tried to say in the video in a mockery way) and a random hacker got that info and it looks like he/she spread the info in the hacking community. So in the end, it means that anyone can use the ID number of your console and do malicious things with it and you can’t do anything, your console can be randomly banned because Sony will think that you jailbreaked your console or something like that,” the post reads.

Better not comment on this.

Source: JVL