One of the largest issues that Sony has dealt with during this generation of consoles has been the security breach by Anonymous. After roughly a month of downtime for the Playstation Network and a ton of apologies, all seemed safe for Playstation 3 owners.
Well, it did seem safe. Infamous hacker group Anonymous has claimed that they’ve yet again breached the Playstation Network’s security system. They’ve stated that they have compromised over 10 million PSN accounts and they have a 50 gigabyte database housing the e-mail and passwords for each account.
https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/statuses/235791587374927872
As their tweet showcases, they’ve posted the passwords in this document. The majority of passwords are encrypted, but the accounts seem to be mostly from Northern Europe. Regardless of the location, it’s a scary situation for Playstation Network users. The Playstation Store was experiencing issues yesterday, but there’s no confirmation as to if this hacking played a part in that issue.
We fully recommend that all users sign into their Playstation Network account and change their password immediately. If you happen to have any credit cards loaded to the account, we’d also highly recommend removing those and switching to PSN cards.
Are you worried that your account will be hacked? Be sure to let us know what you think by leaving us a comment below, or discuss the Playstation Network in our forums.
UPDATE: Shane Bettenhausen, from SCEA, has stated via Twitter that the claim is entirely fake. The file appears to be a replica of what was posted on March 19th on Pastebin.