The PlayStation Network has been hacked again, with non-credit-card information available to the perpetrators. Fortunately for the majority of PS3 owners, the latest PSN hack only affects approximately 93,000 people — or one-tenth of one percent of all PSN and Sony Online Entertainment users.
According to a post on CNN, “Network customers who were affected received an e-mail from Sony notifying them of the issue. Everyone who is affected is required by Sony to change their passwords on the network.” Sony’s chief information security officer, Phillip Reitenger, told CNN that “only a small percentage of those accounts showed suspicious activity after they were accessed.”
After the original PSN hack this spring, Sony was lambasted for not reporting the suspicious activity, let alone the scope of the information breached, in a timely manner. Sony has clearly learned from its past PR mistake, choosing to notify PSN and SOE users very quickly about their account’s status.