“We’ve said publicly when we were compromised before that the information is out there and could have been used. That was obviously the first thing we looked at,” said Smedley. “Then we did the mathematical analysis and said, ‘Obviously that’s not what happened.’ “I’m not going to say it’s impossible (the info came from Sony). We just think that’s not the most likely case.”
Since only 93K users were successfully hacked out of over 70M user accounts, Smedley says that the low success rate of the attack proves the PSN attack was more of a brute force attack than the more invasive April attack. “It’s just simple math. There was such a small percentage of successes. They were attacking with a large number. Because of that, the math tells us it wasn’t (Sony’s information),” he said.
Fortunately, most of the accounts were dormant. Smedley stated, ”Those people in many cases had not yet done their password change. It takes some work to get them to focus on that.”
