A letter sent from Sony to publishers of the PlayStation Network and Qriocity - the breached online entertainment services entering day 23 in the dark - has revealed a few more details about what happened.

A letter sent from Sony to publishers of the PlayStation Network and Qriocity—the breached online entertainment services entering day 23 in the dark—has revealed a few more details about what happened.

No, it doesn't answer your of "when will the services be resumed?" but the letter, obtained by and published in full at Industry Gamers, explains how the hack was discovered:

"On Tuesday, April 19, 2011, Sony discovered that several PlayStation Network servers unexpectedly rebooted themselves and that unplanned and unusual activity was taking place on the network. This activity triggered an immediate response.



"Sony mobilized a larger internal team to assist the investigation of the four suspect servers. That team discovered the first credible indications that an intruder had been in the PlayStation Network system, and six more servers were identified as possibly being compromised. Sony immediately decided to shut down all of the PlayStation Network services in order to prevent any additional damage.



"The scope and complexity of the investigation grew substantially as additional evidence about the attack developed.



The forensic teams were able to confirm that intruders had used very sophisticated and aggressive techniques to obtain unauthorized access, hide their presence from system administrators and escalate privileges inside the servers. Among other things, the intruders deleted log files in order to hide the extent of their work and activity within the network."

It wasn't until two days later, April 21, that the hack and shut down the services.

In the letter, Sony also said it was working with the Federal Bureau of Investigators to track the culprits. However even if "Anonymous," a coalition of hackers assumed to be behind the takedown, were involved, a disaffected former 'nonymous member recently that he doubted such a secret would ever be leaked.

The letter also re-affirms that Sony is appointing its first Chief Information Security Officer for Sony Network Entertainment International, as announced in early May, who will report to Shinji Hasejima, Chief Information Officer of parent company Sony Corp.

For more background on the outage, see Also check out ways PSN users can hedge against financial losses incurred by the theft of credit card information: ."

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