By: Aseem Gaurav, May 3, 2011
Within days of Sony admitting of a huge security breach, in which a hacker allegedly stole information related to 77 million PlayStation users, the company has reported yet another hacking incident.
The security breach happened on April 18 wherein hackers accessed personal info from nearly 24.6 million Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) service – which hosts a variety of online PC games like EverQuest. Hackers stole the credit-card data for about 12,700 non-U.S. accounts and 10,700 bank-account numbers from a database of 2007.
Sony discovered the theft only on May 2 and subsequently took SOE offline.
The combined figures of both the thefts means that over 100million customer accounts have now been compromised.
Pressure is mounting on Sony to restore services and compensate players.
Sony Online Entertainment network allows users to play games played over the Internet on PCs with "EverQuest" being one of its most popular games.
Sony has drawn major flak for their inappropriate handling of the data protection incidents. The company is facing potentially severe legal and political consequences over its failure to protect customer information.
The company has apologised to customers for the breach and has said its PlayStation Network will be up-and-running as soon as possible.
