Has the hack attack on Sony reached into the world of Swedish Internet banking? Probably not, but it is weird that in the midst of the outage at Sony my Internet bank is suddenly offline.
I never thought a hacker attack on a video game network would affect me much. But the outage of the Playstation Network means baseball games from MLB.tv are not available that way either. So it’s been day after day of not being able to watch the Giants.
Then there’s Star Wars Galaxies, a game that went into a nosedive after Sony Online Entertainment ruined it with a complete rewrite of the rules called the NGE. None of the people I knew who played the game pre-NGE are still there. But I play Star Wars Galaxies, because I like Star Wars, not because I am into games. As an online magazine noted at the time, SOE thought they had changed the rules for a mere game. They didn’t understand they had created and then disenfranchised a community, which is what an online game can become.
But now Star Wars Galaxies too is offline because of the hacker attack. Not only that, all of the support forums where players communicate with each other and the developers outside the game is closed down too.
The good news is that not being able to play a game or watch baseball means I can enjoy the arrival of early Summer in Sweden.
However, I really have to wonder why Skandiabanken is offline now as well? Not only their website, even their telephone service is closed. The idea that an Internet bank would be using the facilities of a games network is fascinating, but hopefully unlikely. I don’t know how many of the bank’s cutomers might have had their credit card information stolen by the hackers, but closing down the whole bank might be a way to dealing with a problem like that
Although it might be nice if Skandiabanken just said what the problem is.