Just hours after the much awaited re-launch of the PlayStation Network, it suffered a crash. The crash resulted in the turning off of the online service once again. The re-launch has been eagerly awaited by the PSN gaming community as the service went offline after a series of much publicized hacker attacks.

After a month of being offline, the PlayStation Network re-launching has resulted in a massive amount of simultaneous traffic. An announcement made by Sony stated that the sudden crash of the reinstated network is the result of heavy password resets and service demands.

The cyber criminals who managed to breach the security of the PlayStation Network has managed to access users’ private data. The eager gamers were met with a request to reset their passwords to enter the network once again.

For the users who are complaining about the further delays to the reinstating of the PlayStation Network, Sony has sent a further announcement. According to the tweeted statement, the password resets are expected to take some time to clear the ISPs and to reach the emails of the users. Sony requests the users to bear with them a little longer until the whole matter is settled.

However, latest reports claim that the Japanese government has suspended the PSN services from the country until Sony is able to meet their security demands. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has issued a statement saying that as of may 13, Sony has not shown much promise in exercising of their security measures. It is said that the Japanese government expects preventative methods as well as tighter security before the network is allowed clearance to go online within the country.

As of now, certain parts of the PlayStation Network have been turned off until further notice.

Latest news state that hackers had broken in to the online account site of Citibank and credit card details, account numbers, and email addresses have been compromised. According to a statement issued by Citigroup, about one percent of the credit card information of their customers has been viewed by the intruders.

Citibank boasts an impressive client base of over 21 million credit card customers within North America. The attack was detected when conducting a routine monitoring session. However, exact information on the number of accounts faced the breach were not yet revealed.

However, the information stolen includes a great deal of personal information with the potential to lead to identity theft. Among the compromised data were social security numbers, birth dates, card security codes and even card expiration dates as per the announcement made by the bank.

Sheila Bair, chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation commented on the matter. According to her statement, both the banks and federal regulators have to remain in constant vigilance to avoid situations such as this from repeating in the future. She further stated that the FDIC and other federal agencies are developing new rules to encourage banks to pay special attention to improve their online security.

However, the attack on Citibank is not the only attack of its kind to be reported within the last few weeks. One June 1^st, Google Inc. stated that several personal Gmail accounts belonging to senior U.S. government officials and military personnel were attacked while broadcaster PBS confirmed that the network’s website was hacked on 30^th May. The widely publicized attack on Sony’s PSN saw millions of users data compromised and an extended offline period followed by numerous crashes and glitches.

Sean Kevelighan, a spokesman for Citibank stated that they are currently contacting affected clients and are tightening their security to prevent future attacks.

If you are familiar with Homer’s Odyssey, you know what it means by Trojan Horse. Yes, at least the concept. If you don’t know what’s there in Odyssey, let’s me explain you what happed there at Troy.

In Homer’s Odyssey, there exists a city called Troy, which has a wall that cannot be broken by the enemies. Therefore, Troy has been regarded as one of best cities in terms of security. Due to the same reason, no other kingdom would take the chance of fighting with Troy. But one king is going to Troy with thousands of ships for fighting with Troy but looses in the initial rounds of the war. Finally the attacking army pretends that they left the war and keeps a large wooden horse on the shore where Troy king takes it to the Troy city as a monument of the war. But apparently, there had been well trained soldiers hiding inside the wooden horse where they came out of the house and open the gates of Troy for the rest of the army to come in. Eventually Troy was burnt to ashes and it was a victory achieved by the Trojan horse.

Now you can relate the above epic to your computer by assuming Troy as your computer and Trojan Horse as a kind of virus. Troy’s wall is somewhat similar to your security system (anti-virus software or firewall) and Trojan Horse can surpass your security system by misleading it.

Let’s talk about what is exactly done by the modern Trojan horses to our computer systems. Let’s take Melissa, most popular Trojan Horse of all time as an example. First you may get an email with an attachment and the email is written in such a way that you would open the attachment. If the attachment is opened by the user, it would run a hidden macro without the user’s knowledge. If Microsoft Outlook is present in the user’s PC, Melissa will take first 50 contacts and mail itself to those 50 contacts. This way, Melissa could multiply rapidly within a very short period of time and soon the internet was full of Melissa emails. Since the demand was so high for email servers, most of them crashed causing more business damages. Eventually the anti-virus programs were updated to find and kill, Melissa.

I assume that, by now you understand the similarities between the epic and the modern Trojan Horse. It is very important to keep your virus scanner up-to-date for catching Viruses before they make any damage to you.