The personal details of millions of Sony customers including many who are believed to live in Australia have been posted online by hackers who left messages behind on a Sony Pictures web site.The data includes the names, birth dates, addresses, emails, phone numbers and passwords of people who had entered contests promoted by Sony. It is not known whether the details relating to Australians who entered Sony’s promotion for Free Playstation consoles were included in the exposed data.
Hacker group LulzSec, said it had infiltrated the firm’s systems to prove how vulnerable they were to “simple attacks”.
The data was stolen from a Sony Pictures, web site.
In a message on Twitter, the group said: “1,000,000+ unencrypted users, unencrypted admin accounts, government and military passwords saved in plaintext. #PSN compromised.
A longer statement posted on the posted on the pastebin.com website explained the action, saying: “Greetings folks. We’re LulzSec, and welcome to Sownage. Enclosed you will find various collections of data stolen from internal Sony networks and websites, all of which we accessed easily and without the need for outside support or money.
“We recently broke into SonyPictures.com and compromised over 1,000,000 users’ personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts.
“Among other things, we also compromised all admin details of Sony Pictures (including passwords) along with 75,000 ‘music codes’ and 3.5 million ‘music coupons.”
The group said they had been unable to copy all the information due to a lack of resources but pasted samples online.
