Hacker Group Claims Another Sony Breach

2 Jun, 2011 By: Chris Tribbey

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The same day Sony Corp. aimed to fully restore its PlayStation Network services after being more than a month offline due to a hacker breach, another hacker group claimed it had infiltrated the personal information of more than 1 million users at SonyPictures.com.

The group, LulzSec, said in a statement June 2 that it was able to steal passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth and all Sony opt-in data users give to SonyPictures.com.

“Among other things, we also compromised all admin details of Sony Pictures (including passwords) along with 75,000 ‘music codes’ and 3.5 million ‘music coupons,’” the group’s statement read. “What’s worse is that every bit of data we took wasn’t encrypted. Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plaintext, which means it’s just a matter of taking it. This is disgraceful and insecure: they were asking for it. This is an embarrassment to Sony.”

Jim Kennedy, EVP of global communications for Sony Pictures Entertainment, said in a statement: “We are looking into these claims.”

If true the breach would be a setback for Sony, which spent millions upgrading its PlayStation Network, Sony Online Entertainment and Qriocity music services to better protect users’ information, after a mid-April series of hacker attacks compromised the personal information of more than 100 million users. It took until June 2 for Sony Corp. to fully resume online service in the United States, Europe and parts of Asia.

Sony created a new position of chief information security officer in the wake of the attacks, which it claims cost the company more than $170 million.
 

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