14 DAY TRIAL // Reports from the PS3 hacking scene suggest the PlayStation Network (PSN) outage, now going into its sixth day, might have been caused by a security hole that enabled piracy.
The PSN went down unexpectedly before the Easter break, on April 20, and remains offline at the time of writing this article with little information about what's going on being available.
Sony only broke the silence after two days to say that the reason for the outage was an "external intrusion."
A subsequent announcement made on Sunday stated that the system is being rebuilt to offer better security to customers.
There is currently no estimated date for when the service will be brought back online, despite PS3 owners growing increasingly impatient and angry.
Meanwhile, a PSX-Scene.com moderator who uses the online handle of Chesh, launched an interesting and plausible theory about what prompted Sony to take such a drastic measure.
According to him, at the end of March, a new version of a PS3 CFW (custom firmware) called REBUG was released.
This third-party firmware unlocks some PS3 features reserved only for developers and some people figured out how to use it to access the PSN developer network.
The PSN dev network is separate from the one used by regular users and it is considered "trusted" by Sony, even though other custom firmwares enabled access to it in the past.
Sony's attempts to keep modded PS3 consoles out of the PSN has been an back and forth battle, so this new development wouldn't have been a big deal for the company had some people not discovered that the dev network fails to validate credit card numbers.
According to Chesh, on April 3 instructions on how to use REBUG to get onto the dev network and subsequently access online Call of Duty game servers appeared on the Internet. Four days later rumors started to spread that a method of pirating PSN content via the dev network was found.
According to new reports, all developers have been notified that only consoles running 3.60 or higher debug firmware versions will continue to be allowed on the dev network. Those running older versions need to upgrade.