Sony locks 93,000 accounts after hack attempts

gallery

Sony has been forced to lock down 93,000 customer accounts after a huge set of compromised logins and passwords was tested on the vendor's gaming services.

The electronics giant said around 60,000 PlayStation Network (PSN) and 33,000 Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) accounts have been shut down, allowing no one to access them.

However, Sony admitted activity in a small fraction of those accounts had been detected, even following the company’s actions.

These attempts appear to include a large amount of data obtained from one or more compromised lists from other companies.

It comes just over five months after Sony was battered by cyber attacks. Strikes on the PSN and SOE networks resulted in the loss of over 100 million gamers’ details, whilst a number of other Sony sites were hit, resulting in a nightmarish year for the company in terms of security.

The PlayStation creator claimed it was likely the login and password details used to compromise accounts in this fresh attack came from non-Sony sources.

“These attempts appear to include a large amount of data obtained from one or more compromised lists from other companies, sites or other sources,” said recently-appointed chief information security officer Philip Reitinger, in a blog post.

“In this case, given that the data tested against our network consisted of sign-in ID-password pairs, and that the overwhelming majority of the pairs resulted in failed matching attempts, it is likely the data came from another source and not from our networks.”

Affected users will receive an email asking them to change their passwords.

Sony advised customers to choose “hard-to-guess” passwords, even though in this case it appears the passwords were stolen from a database or databases. In this scenario, no matter how strong a customer’s password is, it would not have made a difference.

Fortunately for consumers, it appears no credit card data has been compromised, although Sony said it would be updating customers as investigations continue.

Email to a friend

Print this page