[Scarlett.]

While Japanese newspaper Nikkei.com claims that Sony fell victim to a second attack, a recent press release from Sony states that the recent credit card theft took place during the original attack on April 16. Unfortunately, Sony didn’t discover that its security had been compromised on this level until the morning of May 2. After discovering this additional information, Sony shut down its servers.

According to the company’s press release, “This information, which was discovered by engineers and security consultants reviewing SOE systems, showed that personal information from approximately 24.6 million SOE accounts may have been stolen, as well as certain information from an outdated database from 2007.”

While 12,700 card numbers may have been stolen, these were from non-U.S. cardholders, and they were taken from an outdated database. Furthermore, the card’s security codes were also not taken. While the hack is still worrisome, it’s nice to have some clarification on these issues.

ORIGINAL STORY: As if things couldn’t get any worse for Sony, last night 12,700 credit card numbers were stolen from Sony Online Entertainment servers. Will the Internet ever be safe again?

BGR picked up on a news story from Japanese newspaper Nikkei. Reportedly, over 12,700 customer credit card numbers were stolen during a breach of Sony’s online gaming network, Station.com. We don’t know if this attack is related to the PSN hack from a week and a half ago, but SOE’s online servers were taken offline this morning while the company investigates the matter.

According to Engadget, 4,300 of the 12,700 card numbers belonged to Japanese customers, and many more could be expired cards that are no longer in use. Still, all this Internet fallout makes us want to crawl into a bomb shelter and wait for a future where we’ll be trading bottle caps for clean drinking water.

Game Informer

This is seperate from PSN, it's a different wing of the company

[Niall]

Well done on creating sophisticated security systems Sony!

[Rob]

Glad i'm not with sony :P