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Sony Online Entertainment Shut Down

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(Photo: canadiancontent.net)

Sony Online Entertainment announced that hackers may have stolen information from approximately 24.6 million SOE accounts.

In a statement released on their website, the entertainment giant said the discovery was made by engineers and security consultants reviewing the SOE system.  Certain information from an outdated database from 2007 may have also been affected, the company said.

SOE said the information stolen from the outdated database includes approximately 12,700 non-U.S. credit or debit card numbers and expiration dates. Also, 10,700 direct debit records of certain customers in Austria, Germany, Netherlands, and Spain may have been stolen. The hack occurred on April 16 and 17, the San Diego, California-based company said.

After investigating its own system, the company “promptly shut down all services related to SOE services while continuing to review and upgrade all of its online security systems in the face of these unprecedented cyber-attacks,” the statement says.

The company is working with the FBI, Sony Online Entertainment said, as well as continuing its own investigation into the hack.

The stolen data includes names, address, e-mail address, birth dates, gender, phone number, login name and hashed passwords, from the 24.6 million SOE users, according to the statement.

And SOE users from Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Spain may have had bank account numbers, customer names, account names, and customer address stolen as part of the hack from the 10,700 direct debit records.

“The company is committed to helping its customers protect their personal data and will provide a complimentary offering to assist users in enrolling in identity theft protection services and/or similar programs,” SOE said.

After a mysterious shutdown of Playstation’s Network, the company announced last week that SOE was the victim of a cyber attack.

The company defended their decision to announce the hack a week after the network went offline because it took forensic analysts some time to learn that consumer date was compromised.

Last week, a House of Representatives subcommittee wrote a letter to the chairman of Sony asking for answers regarding the Playstation Network hack. And on Sunday the Associated Press reported that three executives from Sony Corp’s. apologized by bowing for several seconds at their Tokyo headquarters.

SOE announced on Monday that they temporarily turned off all SOE game services. There are 77 million user accounts, and approximately 36 million of those are in the U.S.