Yeah that was Sony's way of making up for it. From what I understand, the Class Action suit is for people who opted out of that to sue instead. They're pretty much getting the same deal, though, it's the attorneys who make out.

Nothing like this had ever really happened before, I'm guessing the people behind it were never caught. I remember Socom 4 had just came out at the time as a big multiplayer game for Sony, so the attack pretty much guaranteed the game would fail. It's likely that this contributed to Zipper studios closing down.

One positive that came out of it was that it got Sony more comfortable with giving away free games, something they now do every month with PlayStation Plus, 2 a piece for each of their platforms.