14 DAY TRIAL // Following recent revelations that PlayStation Network (PSN) was compromised by hackers who stole the personal information of millions of users, Sony Online Entertainment, another division of Sony Corporation, announced a computer intrusion that led to the exposure of over 24 million personal and financial records.
San Diego-based Sony Online Entertainment LLC, is a developer and publisher of massively multiplayer online games, such as EverQuest and EverQuest II.
"Sony Corporation and Sony Computer Entertainment announced today that their ongoing investigation of illegal intrusions into Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE, the company) systems revealed yesterday morning (May 2, Tokyo time) that hackers may have stolen SOE customer information on April 16th and 17th, 2011 (PDT)," the company said in a press release.
The engineers investigating the intrusion have determined that personal information including names, addresses, emails, birth dates, genders, phone numbers, login names and hashed passwords, of 24.6 million SOE customers might have been stolen.
In addition, there is reason to believe that hackers also stole 10,700 bank account numbers associated with customer names, addresses and account names.
Because the SOE services are subscription-based, the company will extend the subscription period with 30 days for all accounts. In addition, it will be compensating them with an additional free day for every day the system remains offline.
SOE also plans to provide free subscriptions with identity theft protection services for customers in each of the affected regions, which include Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Spain.
This breach is even more serious than the PSN one which exposed 27 million records, because in this case, the loss of financial information is very likely. In PSN's case, the compromise of billing data was considered unlikely because it was stored in encrypted form.
SOE operates online servers for games like EverQuest, EverQuest II, PlanetSide, Star Wars Galaxies, Free Realms, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, and DC Universe Online.