One man in government isn’t so happy about the latest downtime and how Sony handled it. Who is he? Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, and he wrote a letter to Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) President Jack Tretton. Here is a little excerpt from the letter.

“Compounding this concern is the troubling lack of notification from Sony about the nature of the data breach. Although the breach occurred nearly a week ago, Sony has not notified customers of the intrusion, or provided information that is vital to allowing individuals to protect themselves from identity theft, such as informing users whether their personal or financial information may have been compromised,” he wrote. “Nor has Sony specified how it intends to protect these consumers.”

But that isn’t the only thing Sony has to worry about. Because of how shady they were in their handlings as well as how long they waited to let their users know exactly what had happened, there is the possibility that Sony could be facing several lawsuits.

Sony’s response is that even if credit card information is stolen, at least we won’t be responsible for the damages because of fraud protection. That is all a bunch of court mumbo jumbo, though, and I find it rather boring for today’s topic. I’d rather let you know some inside information that you won’t read elsewhere. That’s right.

How would you feel if I let you know how all this happened, instead of what will happen because of it? Now, have you heard of jailbreaking the PS3? Now. What happened is something known as a “rebug” technique. Basically, you can trick your PS3 into thinking that it is sending debug units to the Sony servers. That being said, you can ideally enter any information (credit card, billing, etc.) that you want and you will be able to download the games and content you want. Basically, Sony trusts their developers with the debug units, and they don’t think their own developers will rip them off. However, it wasn’t their developers doing the ripping. All of these users that had jailbroken their PS3′s, courtesy of George Hotz originally, could use this exploit to their benefits. Sony, being the “dominant” force that they are, recognized this issue way after they should have. That “external intrusion” was this rebug technique. It wasn’t true hacking, but exploiting poor coding on Sony’s part.

To summarize, you jailbreak your PS3. Then, you “rebug” your PS3 into sending debug units to the servers. Then, you can download anything you want. Sony got pissed that everyone was doing it, and had to shut down their servers in order to fix this. It’s technical stuff, but not too complex if you know what you are doing.

Perhaps I did not do the best in describing this. However, I cannot leak out too much information, because I don’t want them to come after me. Anyway, if you would like more information or clarifications, simply email me or leave a comment. And no, I cannot help you do this.

And to clarify, this was NOT the work of George Hotz or Anonymous. This was hundreds, maybe thousands, of users exploiting simple tricks to get free content, causing Sony to lose millions of dollars. So please, stop blaming them.

Sources: Engadget & Years of Experience