Sony is hit with yet another hack attack, thousands of passwords compromised

SOGGY PHOENIX SONY has suffered yet another attack by hackers that has seen a further million of its customers' personal data exposed online.

Sony's online reputation hasn't so much been smashed in recent months as eviscerated. From the outside it appears that the Japanese firm's network security is passed-out prone on the ground while hackers, crackers, and probably random passersby pick its pockets.

Having seen its online gaming and music services broken into and then closed down for around a month, the firm has now been shamed even further by having its Sony Pictures databases burgled.

The latest attack, from Lulzsec, a group of hackers with perhaps some loose links to Anonymous, apparently has been designed to embarrass the firm to its fullest, and coincidentally or not it released the information it had gathered on the same day that Sony restored its online services globally.

Lulzsec has been teasing out what it found in Sony documents for a short while, and starting yesterday it really began turning up the heat.

"We're currently grouping together the things we've taken from @Sony and are arranging them in a way that everyone will easily understand," it posted early yesterday.

This was followed up by postings that said, "Everything we have will be published in multiple ways to ensure maximum embarrassment and exposure for @Sony and their security flaws. :D", and, "Hold your F5s for now, we're getting all this juice in one place. Blame @Sony for storing their data in a stupid fashion. Silly Sony!"

Whether this has upset Sony we can't say, as its Twitter feed remained mute. Pastebin, the online text hosting site, was readying itself for the release, however, and tweeted, "Here at @pastebincom we are curious what @LulzSec is going to release.. :)".

What Lulzsec did release were the details of over one million Sony customers, including their unencrypted account IDs, government and military passwords, all saved in plain text. In addition to making these available to download through Bittorrent files, Lulzsec has packed all the documents it has stolen from Sony together as a zip file, for more completist collectors. µ