They weren't actually hacked as far as anyone knows. They just discovered a private key had been leaked and invalid the certificate.

But yeah, their services are buggy as crap.

I work with both PlayStation and Xbox network services (such as the ones affected by this leak) -- Microsoft's APIs are in a different league than the PlayStation ones. API versioning, contracts, solid SDKs, really solid separation of functionality and great coverage of core features. Sony's PlayStation API was clearly an afterthought at best, and a late night project after a drinking binge at worst.

Another instance that reminded me Sony is indeed not a software company is their mobile app. MITM'd it to discover that they were sending something like 500 requests (totalling over 100MB IIRC) every time I opened the app. Wtf?

But yeah, their services are buggy as crap.

Both PS4 and Xbox One network documentation is bordering on useless. I've had a case once where the method copied straight from documentation wouldn't work, we spent half a day debugging it, no dice - we sent an email to a developer support address, they got back with "oh actually, it's not implemented, sorry".

This sounds almost exactly like my experience attempting to develop an app for MySpace back in the day. "Oh shit, Facebook has apps! We need apps!" → I copy and paste their example code, and try to run it → Nothing happens; no hello world, no errors.

It's always funny to me when people say that sort of thing. Highly publicized attacks/vulns are bad, but it's likely that any given thing we use is getting owned all the time.

Well when we see vulnerabilities that can be traced back to boneheaded security, it seems reasonable to have some extra concern. Like when Sony decided to roll it's own crypto implementation for the PS3 and forgot to use different random numbers in one part, leading to the root private keys for the device being broken.

Surely many hacks happen that we never find out about; nonetheless, the real world consequences of both the recent Sony (Pictures) hack and the older PSN hack were quite significant. The latter was quite relevant as it meant no one could play online games on their PlayStations for… weeks? months? if my understanding and recollection are correct.

Xbox is still not an affected device in this.