Major Nelson lets us know that Xbox Live, Xbox.com, and the Xbox forums will be down for a scheduled maintenance period on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 from 0000 to 1400 PST (that’s 3am to 5pm EST for those keeping score). That’s a hefty time for everything to be down, don’t you think? Most of the scheduled maintenance times are 3 hours.
From Major’s article…
Xbox Live, Xbox.com and the Xbox forums will be undergoing scheduled maintenance on Tuesday March 27th (next week) from 0000 to 1400 PT. As a result of this maintenance, Xbox Live, Xbox.com and the Xbox forums will be unavailable during this time. I thought I’d give you enough time to plan next weeks gaming schedule. What to do while you can’t hop on Xbox Live? Xbox.com has you covered with this list. This is purely ‘back end’ work that we scheduled months ago. This is not a dashboard update…that will happen later this Spring.
I don’t buy this being so scheduled. In my opinion, this is due to the Xbox Live Hack we’ve been hearing about, that Microsoft claims never happened. I seem to recall Major saying the scheduled maintenance happens every so often, and this seems pretty quick after the downtime in late February. And for it being down for 14 hours, that seems pretty major to me. This is only speculation, but that’s my opinion.
We reported earlier on the hack of Bungie.net that opened up Xbox Live and user’s credit cards to theft.
Well, Microsoft responded to Kotaku in true MS fashion. No direct answer of what’s going on, no confirmation of the attack, just sort-of brushing it away to the side. Just like they did when myself and a few other users contacted them a bunch to get our credit cards removed from their systems.
Recently, there have been reports of fraudulent activity and account theft taking place on the Xbox LIVE network. Security is a top priority for Xbox LIVE, and we are actively investigating all reports of fraudulent behavior and theft. Any customer with a question about the security of their Xbox LIVE account should contact 1-800-4-MY-Xbox, and
an Xbox Customer Service Representative will help them understand our security policies and procedures.
Either a professional security consultant misinterpreted his data and blew it out of proportion, or Microsoft is dodging the bullet here again. You be the judge.
Ruh Roh Raggy… Kotaku is reporting (from ZDNet) that Xbox Live has been hacked. Apparently, a group of hackers got into Bungie.net and hacked their way through the Live ID system to get into Xbox Live. They’re using their new-found power to steal Microsoft Points for Xbox Live users and also buy new points with their credit cards on file.
According to Kevin Finisterre, a security researcher at Digital Munition, Microsoft Tech confirmed that “accounts are being stolen” and that “Hackers have control of Xbox live and there is nothing we can do about it”.
Ummm, nothing you can do about? Come on, Microsoft. There’s a lot you can do. For starters, allow users to remove their credit card information from their accounts. This has been a problem with Xbox Live since the beginning. Also, it’s your system. Shut it down and fix the leak. I’m sure users will understand that it got hacked, and you’re preventing their money being stolen by having it down for a few hours or a day.
