Sony facing troubling week as reports of another 93,000 Sony network accounts compromised in massive attack, while the company has also had to issue the recall of 1.6 million TVs due to a potential fire risk
It has been another bad week for Sony as the company revealed more than 93,000 Sony Entertainment Network (SEN), PlayStation Network (PSN) and Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) accounts has been affected by yet another hacking attempt. And to add to the image problem, Sony has had to recall more than 1.6 million LCD TVs due to an identified fire risk.
Between Oct. 7th and Oct. 10th, Sony had detected a mass attempt to gain access to PSN accounts, and about 93,000 accounts (of which 60,000 were SEN/PSN accounts, and 33,000 were SOE accounts) were compromised. Sony says that credit card numbers were secure, and if true, this is probably due to increased security measures following the major hacking incident back in April/May of this year.
The SEN/PSN users affected have been emailed with details on how to reset their passwords, while Sony has "temporarily turned off" the 33,000 affected SOE accounts.
Sony denied that their servers have been breached again, "there was no intrusion on our servers," said Sony spokesperson Sean Yoneda, and that the data (the username/passwords) used for the attack originated elsewhere.
The other crisis facing Sony at the moment is the massive recall of LCD TVs that Sony says pose a potential fire risk. Sony's press release identifies the at risk models, which include the post-2007 models of KDL-40V3000, KDL-40VL130, KDL-40W3000, KDL-40WL135, KDL-40XBR4, and KDL-40XBR5. Sony says the fault is with a unspecified "component" inside the tv, which may "overheat and at times ignite inside the television". Most of the affected TVs were sold in the United States and Europe, but some were also sold elsewhere including Japan and Australia. Sony is contacting owners via various ways to offer free examination and repair of the affected TVs.
No reports of actual injuries have been reported, and apart from damaging the TVs themselves, no other damages have been recorded either.