Sony Shuts Services In Canada, Greece & Thailand
Sony Corp. (NYSE:SNE) after suffering a massive online data breach which let to shutting down of the PlayStation Network for a more than three weeks has once again shut down its services in Canada, Greece, Japan, Indonesia and Thailand after detection of hacker intrusions in its networks.
The announcement was made by Sony on Tuesday. The maximum damage was reported from Greece where more than 8500 account details were stolen by the attackers. In Canada more than 2,000 users account details have appeared to have been compromised. The Sony network in Thailand was appeared to have been modified to send fraudulent emails on behalf of Sony to its customers. Codes from the Japanese network were suspected to have been stolen and also suspected intrusions led to the shutting down of the Indonesian network.
This has further caused a setback to the Sony’s plans to resume its online services globally. Sony is under added pressure from its investors who are losing trust in Sony’s ability to come back and gain its customer confidence. However, the fresh attacks did not lead to any losses of credit or debit card information.
However the fresh attacks are just a drop in the pond, compared with the loss of account details and credit card information of more than 100 million users last month. The hackers are claimed to be from the anonymous hacking group and are alleged to have used Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) cloud services.
The Canadian servers of Sony are not connected to its Global network of Sony Ericsson’s servers. After detection of a Security breach, the site was taken offline.
Sony also mentioned in the statement that it is investigating the phishing scam that the servers in Thailand were used for. The services in Indonesia are being suspended to check for attacks and to see it the site has been altered by an intruder. Sony said that it is uncertain if the attacks discovered last month are related to the one detected on Tuesday. There was no evidence found to link the two separate attacks to each other.
In the Japanese network of Sony Music Entertainment, the hackers have appeared to have stolen unknown programming code from the servers related to the sites of the artistes. The Greece unit was attacked by and account details of more than 8,500 customers have been stolen.
Sony has already begun slowly resuming the closed down PlayStation Network and Qriocity entertainment services in North America and other regions except Asia.
