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.)

PlayStation 3

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.