Circuit Breaker

A group of hackers that planned an attack against Sony's servers this weekend was unable to execute its plan.

CNET has learned that our publication of the group's plan may have caused Sony to secure the remaining servers this group claims it had access to, shutting off any avenues for another attack.

Wrote one of the members in the Internet Relay Chat channel the group uses, "Apparently Sony saw that article because the last server that I could access is offline now...its probbaly (sic) being patched like the other servers. There goes our window."

On … Read more

Sony's breached PlayStation Network may well be offline longer than the company had expected, according to a Sony executive.

In a post on Sony's PlayStation.Blog late yesterday, Patrick Seybold, senior director of corporate communications and social media for the company, said Sony was still performing security checks on the system and that it might not be back up and running in the originally announced timeframe. Part of the problem, Seybold said, has been the hitherto unknown size of a breach of the Sony Online Entertainment gaming network, discovered during Sony's investigation into the PlayStation intrusion.

"… Read more

Sony Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer apologized today for the PlayStation Network breach, as meanwhile the company released specific details regarding the identity-theft monitoring promised to its customers whose personal information was exposed in the cyberattack.

Sony has made a deal with identity-protection firm Debix to offer a service called AllClear ID Plus for free to U.S. customers registered with PlayStation Network or Qriocity prior to the attack two weeks ago, Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold wrote in a blog post today.

Stringer today publicly apologized to customers for the first time in a separate letter posted to the PlayStation … Read more

A group of hackers says it is planning another wave of cyberattacks against Sony in retaliation for its handling of the PlayStation Network breach.

An observer of the Internet Relay Chat channel used by the hackers told CNET today that a third major attack is planned this weekend against Sony's Web site. The people involved plan to publicize all or some of the information they are able to copy from Sony's servers, which could include customer names, credit card numbers, and addresses, according to the source. The hackers claim they currently have access to some of Sony's … Read more

For the second month in a row, Best Buy has had to inform customers that their e-mail addresses were stolen.

On April 22, the consumer electronics retailer discovered some e-mail addresses had been exposed in a security breach at a third-party vendor. Best Buy says it then notified customers and began pursuing legal action against the vendor.

The retailer says it had earlier ended its relationship with the unnamed vendor, but it was "a strategic business decision unrelated to data security," according to a Best Buy spokeswoman.

Best Buy was one of the dozens of companies that warned … Read more

The top law enforcement official for the state of New York wants to know more about how Sony's data server security was circumvented in a cyberattack on its PlayStation Network two weeks ago.

On Tuesday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued a subpoena to three of the company's business divisions--Sony Computer Entertainment America, Sony Network Entertainment, and Sony Online Entertainment.

The subpoena is the latest step in probes by legislative and law enforcement officials into what enabled a hacker to gain access to the names, addresses, birthdates, e-mail addresses, and passwords of more than 100 million … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel says it's ready to put the first 3D transistor structure into high-volume production.

The structure it has invented is called Tri-Gate and will be first used in chips manufactured using the 22-nanometer process, nicknamed Ivy Bridge.

Continuing along the path of Moore's Law would have been tough unless something changed dramatically, said Intel Senior Fellow Mark Bohr at a press event here today at the SPUR Urban Center.

Instead of forming the conducting channel on a planar surface, it's on three sides of a 3D "fin." The key advantage comes from the gate wrapping around the fin, said Bohr.

The new structure allows Intel to manufacture smaller, faster, and lower-voltage chips and put them into even smaller devices. … Read more

We've asked a lot of questions about the Sony security breach, some of which Sony has been able to answer. But here's a big so far unanswered one: where has Howard Stringer been?

As chairman, chief executive, and president of Sony, he's been strangely silent on the failure of his company's networked entertainment security systems, which were hacked more than two weeks ago.

When PlayStation Network went offline April 20, Sony communicated with customers via its official PlayStation Blog. Company spokesman Patrick Seybold periodically posted tidbits of information about the outage and repeatedly apologized for the … Read more

It's been a roller coaster of a couple of weeks for Sony and its customers.

At first what seemed like an embarrassing network outage that kept customers from accessing PlayStation Network, Sony's online game play and streaming video service, turned out to be much worse: a sophisticated cyberattack made off with the customer data of 77 million PSN and Qriocity customers.

Sony wasn't very forthcoming with information at first--it was a couple days before it acknowledged why PSN was offline, and two days after that it confirmed the security breach. Then over the weekend, the No. 2 … Read more