It’s no surprise that the recent PSN outage has more than taken its toll on gamers, but recently publishers and developers have come out to show that it just isn’t the gamers who are taking the hit.

In response to publishers fears about the situation, and to help clear the air about what exactly went down (something gamers have known about for a while now), Sony has sent an official letter to its partners that sums up everything related to the PSN down time.

The letter starts off with a succinct summary of the events that led to both the PSN and the SOE servers being shut down. After an inspection of their servers on April 19th, Sony became aware that unauthorized activity was taking place and was forced to shut the PlayStation Network down.

Later in the month, while investigating the SOE servers, the company found that a similar intrusion had taken place, and had to take those servers offline. It’s been almost a month since all this occurred, but the full story has taken longer than expected to come out.

So far, according to Sony, no personal data has been misused, but they are offering identity theft insurance to prevent any malfeasance that might take place at a later date.

On the publisher and developer side of things, Sony revealed some of the beefed up security measures the company has implemented in order to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again. Among them are :

- adding additional automated software monitoring and configuration management to help defend against new attacks;

- enhanced levels of data protection and encryption, as well as additional penetration and vulnerability testing;

- enhanced capabilities to detect software intrusions within the network, unauthorized access and unusual activity patterns;

- implementation of additional firewalls;

- expediting a planned move of the system to a new data center in a different location with enhanced security; and

- appointment of a new Chief Information Security Officer.

This, of course, should be much more successful in preventing hacks than the outdated software that Sony was working with back in mid-April, but its strengths aren’t implicitly explained. The main takeaway should be that Sony is making an effort to increase their security and that they have also made a personnel change to ensure things runner smoother.

In the letter, Sony also outlines the “welcome back” package they are offering that should make those publishers worried gamers are abandoning Sony’s ship rest a little easier. The offering is fairly substantial and if you haven’t already heard about it, you can get the full details here.

Sony then closes out the letter with a sincere apology to its partners, and a promise to ensure an incident like this never happens. More directly it says:

We of course deeply regret that this incident has occurred. We are working closely with the FBI to identify and apprehend the culprits who committed this crime against our consumers, our partners and our company. I know you can appreciate how widespread the problem of cybercrime is in society today. Although no company is immune, we are confident our consumer data will be protected by some of the best security measures available today.

As a valued partner we aim to keep the lines of communication open so that you are aware of our progress. Our focus has been to confirm the security of the networks, protect customer data and get the services back on line as quickly as possible. We will do our best to respond to all of your inquiries and we will do everything we possibly can to support you.

We still do not know how much longer it will be until the PSN comes back online, but as both gamers and publishers/developers continue to take hits, Sony falls further and further out of favor. Letters like this prove they are considerate enough to keep a line of communication open, but, when the dust has cleared, will their partners be as open to collaboration as they were before?

Do you think that Sony’s publishing and development partners are now much more wary of a continued relationship? What do you think of the new security features outlined in the letter?

Source: Industry Gamers