Sony shocked by new attack on 100m online accounts

Sony was this week left reeling from another assault on its PlayStation and SOE security networks, with as many as 100 million accounts targeted and about 93,000 compromised.

The security scare comes after Sony spent two months rebuilding its online network to protect it from hackers. In April, the group discovered that more than 100 million of its online accounts had been compromised.

The latest attack appears to be an attempt to gain access to user accounts through password guesses.

Hackers launched a massive log-in process across both networks’ 100 million users, though the phoney passwords only allowed access to about 93,000 accounts.

Accounts that were illegitimately accessed have ben temporarily locked, Sony said.

The PlayStation group claimed that the passwords used for the log-in attempts were obtained from other sources.

“The overwhelming majority [were] failed matching attempts, so it is likely the data came from another source and not from our Networks,” the company claimed.

“There were approximately 93,000 accounts globally where the attempts succeeded. Only a small fraction of these 93,000 accounts showed additional activity prior to being locked. We are currently reviewing those accounts for unauthorized access, and will provide more updates as we have them.

“As a preventative measure, we are requiring secure password resets for those PSN/SEN accounts that had both a sign-in ID and password match through this attempt,” Sony added.