Sony's PSN / Qriocity Outage Q&A: Your Personal Data Was Not Encrypted.

The long, painful saga of the PlayStation Network outage continues. Today Sony has released a Q&A, providing customers with some long-awaited answers to...every question but the ones we're really curious about.

Who is responsible? We still don't know. But neither does Sony, so we can't exactly blame them for this one.

When will PSN/Qriocity be up again? Once more, the answer here is "nobody knows". Sony expects "some services" to be running "within a week from yesterday". Which is anything but a hard date. Sony will only start things back up when they feel "confident that the network is secure".

I wouldn't be surprised if many services stay down for well over a week. The breach has already spawned a lawsuit and many more are sure to follow. Sony needs to make perfectly certain that their attention to security is unimpeachable from here on out.

But, no matter how good they are now, it seems pretty clear that Sony bungled quite a lot at the start of this disaster. For one thing, their response was far too long in coming. The instant they realized password data had been compromised, their users should have known. And that's only the tip of this iceberg of fail:

"The entire credit card table was encrypted and we have no evidence that credit card data was taken. The personal data table, which is a separate data set, was not encrypted, but was, of course, behind a very sophisticated security system that was breached in a malicious attack."

Hear that, folks? Sony did not encrypt your personal data. This means they feel your home address and password information (and much more) are not important enough to properly secure. They encrypted their credit card data and, so far, it does not appear to have been breached. If the same precautions had been taken with personal data, Sony would not be in nearly as much hot water as they are right now.

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