My credit card number is for sale
11/04/29 at 17:27 EST

Title says it all folks - my credit card number is up for sale. If you want the limited-time chance to own this 16+3 digit gateway to financial happiness, your window of opportunity has arrived. Act fast - the window's closing soon! Details on that shortly.

I'd be surprised if anyone who uses the Internet hasn't heard of the recent PSN breach, one of the "top five" worst security breaches in history. I've been following various stories on it, and I'm not outraged, nor am I disappointed, nor do I feel sorry for Sony. I see arguments on both sides of the fence being thrown around, most of which are outright juvenile ("fanboy wars" sums it up for the most part) but luckily there are other people who see beyond the veil. Even if only one or two of them have made their voice heard.

Sony is being victimized by a terrible evil that they themselves created. Dating back to a few months ago, the state of the PS3/PSN's security had gone largely unaltered from launch. Nobody hacked their consoles or the network. It wasn't for something like a lack of trying, no, it was more like nobody felt the need to. So it was more of exactly a lack of trying. Once the flood gates were open Sony naturally had to do something about it, which they certainly did. Suffice to say, it could have been handled much better than it was. If you're going to demonize your customers, treat them like criminals, and subsequently gloat in their faces as you further restrict their rights (parallels may be drawn to PC DRM as you see fit) you can expect some backlash. It's not for me to say whether or not the compromise of 77 million (give or take) user accounts, including personal data and credit information, is an eye for an eye, but your mileage may vary.

It's hard for me at this point to say whether or not the ones responsible are simply trying to get back at Sony for their recent fumbles in Public Relations or if the crackers are, in fact, greedy cretins. They allegedly tried to sell what they stole back to Sony (this is goodwill at its most foolish level, as though data were costly to duplicate) in a standard form of blackmail before moving on to selling the stolen data to other criminals. This seems like selfish behaviour on the surface, doing something illegal to not just the company, but the "innocent customers" as well, but at the same time, this is the sort of thing that will really hurt the company, which is possibly the motive behind the crime. They're going to lose customers and take a significant hit to their reputation. Really, the reputation's been falling down the stairs since the Other OS incident, but this is easily the worst of it so far.

Now, onto business. Of the 77 million compromised accounts, x of them had credit card information stored on them (I have no idea what the figures for this are, so pay it no mind). Of those x, mine was one such number, which means someone out there is making the effort to sell my credit card number. What am I going to do about it?

A little healthy competition. They may have my credit card number, but so do I. I give you my word that, as of this writing, whether or not my credit card number has been sold to the highest bidder cannot be verified, but I do know for certain that it hasn't been used as of two days ago. So step right up and place an offer; over the next 5 business days, I, too, will be putting my own credit card up for auction, to get a slice of that PSN extortion pie. Drop a line, an offer and an email address (I recommend you create a new one for just this purpose, for security's sake) and if you're the highest bidder, you're on your way to owning a new, zero-liability credit card number*!

*Buyer beware: all purchases made with this card will be flagged as fraudulent and tracked for criminal behaviour under the Terms of Service outlined in ********'s zero-liability security clause. This number will expire in fewer than 3 business days at time of writing. Thank you for your understanding. Happy shopping!
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Tagged under: gaming, life
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