Sony Breach Gets Worse: 24.6 Million Compromised Accounts At SOE

An anonymous reader writes with an update to yesterday morning's news that Sony Online Entertainment's game service was taken offline to investigate a potential data breach related to the PSN intrusion. SOE has now said that they too suffered a major theft of user data. "... personal information from approximately 24.6 million SOE accounts may have been stolen, as well as certain information from an outdated database from 2007. The information from the outdated database that may have been stolen includes approximately 12,700 non-US credit or debit card numbers and expiration dates (but not credit card security codes), and about 10,700 direct debit records of certain customers in Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Spain."

Comments

How far back does it go? This far... 8 years

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't played everquest since 2002 and I got a notice. Luckily for me all that credit card information is outdated and wrong. Event the mailing address is wrong. How someone was able to access this data is beyond me. I cannot, for any reason, think of any justification Sony could have to store something in a manner that a developer could access at this level.

Sony is going to have one hell of a class action lawsuit in it's hands.

Re:A lesson for companies

[foma84]

This is very wrong. As far as anyone can know there is no correlation between the GeoHot affair and this one. Also if that personal data is exposed it'd harm large parts of that same comunity. Unless this id theft was organized only to prove a point (which is very very unlikely imo), this is no more that a plain theft. As in made by criminals. Only upside is that it exposed security issues, maybe as a lesson for the future. Or maybe not.

Re:Best Practices

[mwvdlee]

It's probably tax laws requiring them to hang on to all financial transaction details for a number of years.

Re:Just wondering

[gclef]

I haven't done business with Sony Online Entertainment at all for over a decade, and I'm apparently effected. I subscribed to Everquest way back in the day, but dropped somewhere around 2001. I just yesterday got an email from them that my personal information had been lost. So, don't feel so superior...even if you started boycotting them over the rootkits, they kept your information from before then, and then lost it to hackers.

Re:Just wondering

[delinear]

I'm one of those who have been boycotting Sony since the rootkit fiasco but I'm not going to get preachy about it. For me, it's not some kind of crusade to get them to mend their ways or die, it's actually rather pure self-interest - I just know that they can't screw me over. I do wish a few more people would take note and Sony would mend their ways as a reaction. They used to be a decent company, their hardware was always top notch and I loved the PS1, it's just a bit sad to see them go down this route of profit above all.

Great timing!

[rsilvergun]

I love the way corporations do this, just wait for a big news story (Osama's dead) and then start releasing the full extent of the disaster. The same principle worked for the cigarette companies. They were set to be torn apart of lying about the dangers of smoking and genetic modification to increase addiction, then along came 9/11 and all was forgetting. All you got to do is stonewall until a bigger problem comes along.

Sony Blu-Ray Player

[Sir_Eptishous]

So if I bought a Sony Blu-Ray player a while back, and had to create an account on their site to "access" the device, it appears that account I created has been compromised.