My sony playstation account was hacked

[maflynn]

I got two emails from sony, within two minutes of each other - one stating that my password changed (from France) and secondly my sign-in id was changed.

Took me the better part of 60 minutes on the chat to get it resolved.
I had to verify my email (by getting an email and clicking validate), supply what games I bought, where my account was activated (city/state), my serial number of the playstation. It was painful, but thankfully I got my account back. It still had my name, but a different PSN ID, which had friends, groups and messages that were not for me. My credit card info was still there, but the moment I saw I couldn't access my account I called AMEX and cancelled the card.

I lost my PSN ID, I'm back in the chat queue waiting to see if they can see what that used to be and/or re-use it.

What a pain, I'll bear some of the responsibility by not having 2FA turned on (the hacker turned it on for his phone), and I made sure I added security questions as well.

 

[maflynn]

I needed a second chat session to recover my online id, but thankfully I was able to do it.

 

[I7guy]

How do you think your password was compromised?

 

[maflynn]

How do you think your password was compromised?

No idea

 

[velocityg4]

No idea

Did you reuse a password or have security questions with personal answers? Another possibility is a password reset and they had access to your e-mail. Immediately deleting the password reset e-mail.

 

[maflynn]

Did you reuse a password

It was an old password that I don't use anywhere else, I guess the key word is old

 

[Apple_Robert]

It was an old password that I don't use anywhere else, I guess the key word is old

The age of the password really isn’t the issue. Your password must have been weaker than you thought. Good thing you jumped on the problem quickly.

 

[tranceking26]

I got two emails from sony, within two minutes of each other - one stating that my password changed (from France) and secondly my sign-in id was changed.

Seems like there's weird spam on PSN now too, I logged in to make sure all was okay on my PSN and I had 4 spam private messages. I was added to groups apparently. Did you have any of that?

 

[maflynn]

Good thing you jumped on the problem quickly.

Yes, and I'm quite happy that after getting my account back that I did cancel my amex which was on file, he had no opportunity to buy anything.

Did you have any of that?

Yes, but I have no idea if that was "spam" or him reaching out to his friends

 

[44267547]

As another member alluded to, I suspect the password was rather simplified, which is imperative that passwords are alpha- numeric. I’ve Reached a point where I don’t even log online anymore except for software updates and then I log back off. I have no online friends, no chats or any of that nature, I just prefer the ‘solo gaming aspect‘, but I do want to performance upgrades for stability, and then I just log out, unless of course, the game requires a consistent portal to Internet capability. (Like Doom or Tom Clancy for example.)

 

[maflynn]

As another member alluded to, I suspect the password was rather simplified

I don't know what controls Sony has in place but generally I get emails on failed attempts various sites, and/or three strikes and then an email saying that the acount was locked out. The password wasn't simple, but not overly complex. I had a mixture of letters, numbers and mixed case, what I didn't have is any special characters, i.e., @#$%.

I'm leaning more to that perhaps the password was stolen or floating on the so called dark web. It was a password that used to resuse but I long fell out of that habit. This was probably the last hold over and since I hardly go into my playstation account its password security fell by the way side as well

I've tightened things up, and I'll continue to improve my password controls, not just on playstation.com but else where.

 

[Rich74]

Have you also got two-factor authentication enabled now?