Sony BMG's Greek website has been hacked

PR TEAM BOOTCAMP TESTER Sony has seen another of its online businesses taken down by hackers and sucked clean of personal information.

What a month it has been for Sony. The only way it could have had a worse April would have been if it had run into Westminster Abbey and punched someone in the face during the Royal Wedding.

It's been hacked at more times that an overgrown hedge and time and time again it has fallen victim to these outside attentions.

According to a report on security firm Sophos' blog, Sony BMG, the music arm of Sony, has had its Greece-based systems hacked and information dumped.

"An anonymous poster has uploaded a user database to pastebin.com, including the usernames, real names and email addresses of users registered on SonyMusic.gr," wrote Chester Wisniewski, senior security advisor at Sophos.

Such attacks are common and although successful ones are rarely promoted by the victim company, they do happen often.

Like Howard Stringer before him, Wisniewski, said that no firms are 100 per cent secure.

"It is nearly impossible to run a totally secure web presence, especially when you are the size of Sony", he said. "As long as it is popular within the hacker community to expose Sony's flaws, we are likely to continue seeing successful attacks against them."

In some rare good news for Sony, Wisniewski was optimistic that this gruelling assault on its systems would benefit the firm in the long run.

"While it's cruel to kick someone while they're down, when this is over, Sony may end up being one of the most secure web assets on the net," he added. µ