Playstation: 77 million customer accounts exposed

(CNN) -- A hacker has obtained the personal information of PlayStation Network account holders and subscribers of the Qriocity streaming service, Sony said in a message to customers Tuesday.

Read more: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/04/26/playstation.network.hack/?hpt=T2 

Yup this is scary stuff. Alot of people I know are PSN users. Fingers crossed that we don't end up financing some cyber-criminals retirment fund.

Yes exactly. Good PR response from Sony so far:
"The hacker could have taken credit card numbers, card expiration dates, billing addresses, answers to security questions and purchase history, but not credit-card security codes, they said." Sony is encouraging customers "to protect against possible identity theft or other financial loss" by reviewing credit-card statements. The company also suggested that some customers may want to place a "fraud alert" with credit bureaus. 

Nothing else they could really do at the moment.

It took them 1 week to announce this when they probably knew all along

Most likely the PSN was developed in Japan. Japan have been struggling over the last 5yrs at matching the quality of international products. It wouldn't surprise me if PSN was poorly implemented since day 1.

You might be right here. Still, really tough situation as you might lose all your users really quickly if you don't handle the situation properly.

As there is no time frame on restoration, I'm guessing at least a week. This is damaging Sony's reptutation every day, FaceBook have 600 million users and lots of payment and personal info but it seems they remain vigilant despite being the largest personal data repository

Facebook already had a few security issues in the past and not all accounts have banking data compared to the PSN users.

But, as you said, Facebook seems to be more vigilant on security issues: http://www.allfacebook.com/20-of-facebook-employees-focused-on-security-issues-2010-04 

Not all PSN accounts have credit card info, there are scratch cards also

But even if it's only 1000 credit cards, it's 1000 too many

Can only agree with you.

Everyone is chomping at the bit to get online again, this outage happened during an international public holiday so lots of gaming time lost