Sony has made headlines for all the wrong reasons yet again. The consumer electronics giant acknowledged on Wednesday that its PlayStation Network and other online entertainment services were the target of another cyber attack.
Company officials said that Sony was forced to temporarily lock approximately 93,000 accounts after it noticed a significant spike in unauthorized sign-in attempts on a number of its services. Only a “small fraction“ of accounts showed activity after being locked down, and no credit card data or other sensitive information was compromised, according to Sony Chief Information Security Officer Philip Reitinger.
Sony said that hackers did not target Sony's servers or database, like they did earlier this year in the infamous and embarrassing April breach that compromised the data of more than 100 million users. Rather, the company suspects that hackers pilfered log-in information and passwords from other sites and then tried to use the data on Sony networks.
The company said that it has “taken steps to mitigate the activity” and will provide further updates as they become available. Sony is also sending secure password resets to customers who had both a sign-in ID and password match through the intrusion.
Sony also did its best to distance Wednesday's breach from April's attack, which revealed that the company had less than adequate security measures in place, and led to a complete overhaul of its Web defenses.
“What happened in April was a breach on our servers as we said in our announcements,” Sony spokesman Sean Yoneda told the AP. “But this time around, there was no intrusion on our servers. This was...taking someone else's identity and trying to use that to access our services.”
Sony, which security expert Graham Cluley once referred to “the whipping boy of the computer underground,” lost millions of dollars from April's breach, but didn't drop nearly as many subscribers as analysts expected.
In related news, Sony on Wednesday recalled 1.6 million Bravia flat-panel TVs after finding that defective parts can cause the units to overheat, melt and even catch fire. Clearly a tough day for Sony.
Beecher Tuttle is a TMCnet contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Jennifer Russell
