I've contacted a moderator at PSX-scene and he had this to say:
"Ok, I've seen a bunch of speculation of why people think PSN is down, and I thought I should just post what the community knows in comparison to what Sony is telling everyone. The truth is, there was a new CFW (custom firmware) released known as Rebug ( http://rebug.me). It essentially turns a retail console into a dev console (not fully, but gives you a lot of the same options that usually dev's only have access to). Anyway, this new CFW was quickly figured out to give CFW users access to the PSN network again via the dev networks. With a little manipulation of the URL's through a proxy server you could get your hacked console back online. Not that big of a deal, right? Well, it also turns out that some people over at NGU found out that you could provide fake CC# info and the authenticity of the information was never checked as you were on Sony's private developer PSN network (essentially a network that Sony trusted). What happened next was extreme piracy of PSN content. Sony realizing the issue here shut down the network. Now, before you go freaking out about the latest information posted about Kotaku, no ones personal information was accessible via this hack. Not to say they couldn't get it, but no one is admitting to it being available. Anyway, that's the real reason for the PSN downtime. Sony is now rebuilding all of it's PSN servers to be more secure and (hopefully) make sure the CFW users cannot get online anymore."
It seems Sony basically needs to restart all of their servers and make them more secure. Quite impressive hackers, quite impressive indeed.
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Andrew, you've gotten the right information I'll admit, but Rebug has actually been out in the open for about a month now, if Sony needed to take action that could have a long time ago, but they didn't until now.
I know of NGU and in-fact I'm a member there only to see of information daily and understand both prospectives, and I can tell you that Rebug is not the cause of the issue, it's most surely someone actually hacking into the system externally (Dare I say Anonymous?).
Not to mention you've contacted a Moderator over a PSX-Scene, you'd actually get a better response if you were to contact a hacker, a moderator is just someone that looks after the site, sure he'd be informed, but he's only Human so under-knowledge of what's happening around him would apply.
I have doubts about this theory. If extreme piracy of the Playstation Store was the main concern, then why didn't Sony just shut down the Playstation Store? Why did they shut down the WHOLE Playstation Network?
sony sucks 5 days of no online over this!!
Rebug should NEVER allow dev PSN access. It doesn't make sense for normal users like us to go on dev servers.