PlayStation fans, listen up: Anonymous has not hacked into the PlayStation Network, despite making claims to that effect. The hacktivist group posted to Twitter claiming to have a 50 gigabyte database of email accounts and passwords, putting more than 10 million accounts “at risk”.
The group posted a sample of the “acquired” accounts, and it didn’t take long for gamers to realise they’d seen this one before. Rather than showing any newly accessed accounts, the “hackers” simply re-posted a document of predominantly northern European accounts that had been released on March 19th by “Universe Security Sucks”. (This is one we already knew about, of course.)
Quickly after that discovery, Shane Bettenhausen, a Sony Computer Entertainment America employee working in business development, announced via a now-deleted Tweet that the claim was “totally fake”.
Then, it didn’t take long for the official PlayStation Twitter to make its announcement:
We can confirm that the recent claim that PSN was illegally hacked & that customer PWs and email addresses were accessed is completely false
That said, gamers were very quick to jump on the anti-Sony bandwagon, suggesting PlayStation’s reputation has been irreparably damaged following the PlayStation Network hacks from last year.
The positive thing to take away from this? It probably is a good time to update your passwords anyway. Any excuse.