An Important Message From Sony

[Ironman273]

An Important Message From Sony’s Chief Information Security Officer: "OH GOD, NO, IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN"

Poor old Sony was hammered by both media and its own users earlier this year, after news broke of a large-scale hacking of its PlayStation Network. And now it's happened again.

The latest case involves Sony detecting a mass attempt to sign in to PSN accounts with a job-lot of user names and passwords, which the company says it believes may have been obtained through a third-party rather than extracted from PSN itself. Fortunately, the "overwhelming majority" of user name and password combinations failed.

However, Sony believes approximately 93,000 accounts (33k in Europe) have been compromised, with outsiders able to correctly sign in to PlayStation Network using the stolen data. Those accounts have now been "temporarily locked" pending a new password reset and account validation scheme.

Sony says credit card data is safe, and it'll refund anyone should they find evidence of any suspicious activity.

Source: Gizmodo

[Rooster69]

Odd. I know when I the first time I logged into PSN after the first attack I had to change everything. That leads me to believe that these accounts were alternate accounts or dead accounts. Since PSN is free people do have multiple accounts. Either way Sony can not win.

[SMELTN]

I haven't used my station account since Star Wars Galaxies. So its been a few years.... I got this message in my email box 4 hours ago.

Customer Service Notification We are writing to let you know that we have detected an unauthorized attempt to verify the validity of your Sony Online Entertainment ("SOE") Station Account name and password. We believe there was an attempt to use a scripted application of a large set of sign-in IDs and passwords against our network database. This attempt appears to include a large amount of data obtained from one or more compromised ID and password lists obtained from other companies, sites or other sources. To protect you, we have locked your Station Account. To reopen the account, please contact SOE customer service at 1 (858) 537-0898 to verify your identity. We will walk you through the password reset process then. Please note that your credit card number is NOT at risk. As a precaution, please review your account for unusual activity and please contact us at 1 (858) 537-0898; we will work with any users with whom we confirm have had unauthorized purchases with account wallet funds, and restore those funds. We want to take this opportunity to remind our consumers about the increasingly common threat of account theft, as well as the importance of having a strong password and having a username/password combination that is not associated with other online services or sites. We advise you to create a new password that is strong, consisting of a combination of numbers, letters and special characters or symbols. Thank you, Sony Online Entertainment

[LittleNeutrino Veteran]

I am starting to wonder if it is even worth it to keep my PS3 connected these days :p

[bjoswald]

I feel so sorry for my friend; he's still Sony's bitch. I wonder what excuse he'll give me this time...

At this point, I think PS3 owners would be more secure with a bag of grapefruit than these clowns.

[Rigby]

Maybe they should take a page from Blizzard and start using authenticators.