To all of you people worried about hackers ruining your online gaming - blame the developers and Sony for making such design choices that freely allow it. If the structure of coding on consoles was better, there would be plenty of ways to prevent such occurrences, yet, instead of improving the quality of their product, in this case, Sony prefers to just shut down functionality of PS3 down, one by one.
Just like with always-online DRM schemes for some PC games, this is going the easy mode route from Sony. Perhaps changing the structure of the console is not possible till next gen, but it's their fault they haven't planned ahead for such situations. Answer yourself this. Why online games on PCs are still playable, despite full access to both hardware and software while console games suffer from much higher rates of cheaters abusing the hacks?
I don't mind them banning people who mod their consoles, it's in their rights because online service is service provided by them and they can filter the access to their will, limiting the un-verified machines to use it. But legal actions? That is a step too far.