14 DAY TRIAL // Sony has dealt with a new breach over the weekend which exposed the names and partial addresses of 2,500 people who participated in a sweepstakes contest ten years ago.
Sony learned about the intrusion after hackers stole the information and posted it on a public website. The company took measures to remove the data from the Internet and apologized for the new incident.
The information was taken from a website that was used for a product sweepstakes contest back in 2001.
"The website was out of date and inactive when discovered as part of the continued attacks on Sony," the company told Reuters.
No credit card details, Social Security numbers or user passwords were compromised in this new incident.
The breach comes after recent reports that a group of hackers was planning a new attack against Sony that was to involve the disclosure of sensitive information stolen from its systems.
There is no evidence to definately link the rumored plan to the new breach, however, if the coincidence would be pretty big if they weren't related.
In other news, Sony announced that restoring the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services has been further delayed. "When we held the press conference in Japan last week, based on what we knew, we expected to have the services online within a week.
"We were unaware of the extent of the attack on Sony Online Entertainment servers, and we are taking this opportunity to conduct further testing of the incredibly complex system," the company explained in a new post on the official PlayStation blog.
These delays are affecting Sony's shares, which have decreased in value by six percent since the PlayStation Network went down on April 20 as a result of a massive security breach that exposed the personal, and in some cases financial, details of over 75 million people.
Update May 10, 2011: Corrected the date when the PlayStation Network was taken offline by Sony. The article previously read August 20.