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In Sony-speak, "poor internal security" translates into "massive business opportunity".

Wow, neat! At what payment level do I get to have my personal information stolen? I'm so excited, I can't wait to have my credit card number sold to the Russian mafia and my username and password hash posted on 4chan!

http://www.soe.com/securityupdate/pressrelease.vm While this was for Sony Online Entertainment; its fairly safe to assume that PSN, which was the target in the attack - was hit harder.

What burns me is that I'm being denied a service by SOE that I am paying for. As an Everquest player, I hardly count...but I get charged a monthly fee to play this game. Sony has said nothing about a payment moratorium, so I assume they're going to keep charging me. When I try to log in, I get a message that I have been disconnected from their server, and a link to their "support" website that basically tells me that the service is down, and that hasn't changed in over a week.

What could they do instead? Well, I don't see why they couldn't at least bring up the game, with a warning to change our passwords. If they can't do that, then I'd like to know the reason why. Or I would like the opportunity to unsubscribe from their non-existent services. I'd say that SOE's reaction to this debacle is something like a man who's been stung by a swarm of bees, and then thinks it will help if he douses his house with gasoline and lights everything on fire.

Possibly their databases are so messed up that they can't collect their monthly payments? Hey, I bet that's not the case! I'll have to watch my credit card account to see if they make charges. Along with those other strange transactions that have started to pop up. Did I really buy a yacht in Singapore? Damn.

Sony has updated the page with a full notification of what happened, see: http://www.soe.com/securityupdate/

"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.

Customers outside the United States should be advised that we further discovered evidence that information from an outdated database from 2007 containing approximately 12,700 non-US customer credit or debit card numbers and expiration dates (but not credit card security codes) and about 10,700 direct debit records listing bank account numbers of certain customers in Germany, Austria, Netherlands and Spain may have also been obtained. We will be notifying each of those customers promptly."

SOE = Sony Online Entertainment