It's all fun and games until someone loses their card number. Less than a week after reporting that hackers had stolen personal informat...
It's all fun and games until someone loses their card number.
Less than a week after reporting that hackers had stolen personal information from 77 million PlayStation Network users, Sony revealed that an extra 24.6 million gamers on its Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) network have also fallen victim to cyberthieves.
According to a statement released earlier Tuesday, the stolen data includes names, addresses, e-mail addresses, birthdates, genders, phone numbers, login names and "hashed" passwords. A hashed password is designed so that it cannot be decoded to determine the user's true password.
The hackers also retrieved 12,700 debit card numbers and expiration dates from users in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. The stolen data did not include the three-digit security codes on the backs of the cards; however, not all merchants require this code to process a transaction.
The SOE data was stolen on April 16 and 17, prior to the PlayStation Network heist; however, Sony claims that it did not discover the latest plundering until Monday morning. The two networks are separate, with SOE servicing PC gamers and the PlayStation Network servicing console gamers.
Sony has suspended its SOE service while it investigates the virtual break-in. The company pledges to grant customers 30 days of additional time on their subscriptions, in addition to compensation for each day the system is down.
This latest breach caps off a turbulent few days for Sony chairman Kazuo Hirai who received a request last Friday from the U.S. House of Representatives demanding answers surrounding the PlayStation Network breach. As of Tuesday, the PlayStation Network service was still suspended.
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