[morganpyne]

A moderator from PSX-Scene.com gave an interesting in-depth explanation as to what is going on with the PlayStation Network on a Reddit AMA recently:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/gx6o4/im_a_moderator...

His take (and he admits it is speculation but it sounds quite plausible) was that a custom PS3 firmware called Rebug gave Playstations Developer-level access to the network, which allowed you to do a whole lot of things without much authentication (input from dev. consoles was trusted far too blindly). This firmware permitted all kinds of shenanigans, up to and including allowing credit cards without validation.

I haven't seen any official comment from Sony on the topic, but there is further speculation that a lot of stored information may have been compromised and that wholesale theft via unvalidated CCs has gone on. Quite a serious breach, and a very poor show on behalf of Sony to blindly trust user input like that from dev. consoles if this turns out to be true.

[shii]

As submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2482679

[swaits]

So, a non-Sony employee, on a non-Sony forum, admittedly "speculates" what appears to be a bunch of garbage nonsense, and that's newsworthy?

[Groxx]

... while providing supporting evidence, in the face of Sony's utter silence aside from "down now, up when it's up"? Yes. That makes their link by far the most informative thing I've seen on this to date.