{"id":11526,"date":"2011-05-03T07:36:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T05:36:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T22:00:00","slug":"pc-gamers-victim-of-sony-hack-attacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/pc\/11526-pc-gamers-victim-of-sony-hack-attacks","title":{"rendered":"PC gamers victim of Sony hack attacks"},"content":{"rendered":"

A mere day after Sony executives bowed their heads in apology<\/a> for the PlayStation Network (PSN) security breach, which saw 77 million user accounts compromised along with credit card information, it has emerged that the Sony Online Entertainment division was also a victim of a hacking attack.<\/p>\n

While the PSN is the matchmaking and product services platform for PlayStation 3 users, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) hosts an online gaming service equivalent for PC gamers. SOE hosts a number of games for their PC gaming customers, the most popular including EverQuest, EverQuest II, Free Realms, and DC Universe Online.<\/p>\n

SOE issued a statement on 2 May 2011<\/a> saying: “Our ongoing investigation of illegal intrusions into Sony Online Entertainment systems has discovered that hackers may have obtained personal customer information from SOE systems.  We are today advising you that the personal information you provided us in connection with your SOE account may have been stolen in a cyber-attack.   Stolen information includes, to the extent you provided it to us, the following: name, address (city, state, zip, country), email address, gender, birthdate, phone number, login name and hashed password.”<\/p>\n

At the time, SOE wasn’t revealing the extent of the breach, but did disclose that from an ‘outdated’ 2007 database 12,700 non-US customers credit and\/or debit card details were stolen, along with a further 10,700 direct debit records for customers in Germany, Austria, Netherlands and Spain. SOE will be directly notifying the affected customers.<\/p>\n

The stolen information includes:<\/p>\n

•    Bank account number
•    Customer name
•    Account name
•    Customer address.<\/p>\n

As a result of the discovered security breach SOE has taken the following steps:<\/p>\n

•    Temporarily turned off all SOE game services;
•    Engaged an outside, recognized security firm to conduct a full and complete investigation into what happened; and
•    Taken steps to enhance security and strengthen network infrastructure to provide greater protection of personal information.<\/p>\n

On 3 May 2011, SOE had more dour news<\/a>. Their investigation has revealed that the security breach occurred over 16 and 17 April 2011 and that 24.6 million SOE accounts were stolen, on top of the information from the 2007 database.<\/p>\n

The stolen information includes:<\/p>\n

•    Name
•    Address
•    E-mail address
•    Birthdate
•    Gender
•    Phone number
•    Login name
•    Hashed password<\/p>\n

This adds 24.6 million accounts – many of which will belong to PC gamers – to the already known 77 million PSN user accounts that were compromised. This is over 100 million total account details compromised across Sony gaming services.<\/p>\n

Those concerned can expect e-mails from SOE and can also keep track of information updates on the security breach via the SOE website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In an attempt to ‘make good’ on this security breach, SOE intends to give all customers an additional 30 days on the subscriptions, as well as one day for each day the system is down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

24.6 million Sony Online Entertainment accounts compromised, data stolen, services offline<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":157,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_enabled":true,"_sma_x_custom_text":"","_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/157"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}