Sony Investigating Hacker Claims of Data Theft at Film Unit
By Cliff Edwards and Mariko Yasu
(Adds analyst comments in fifth paragraph.)
June 3 (Bloomberg) -- Sony Corp. started investigating a hacker group’s claim that it stole personal information from 1 million accounts at Sony Pictures website.
A group calling itself LulzSec posted statements online saying it broke into SonyPictures.com and downloaded unencrypted personal information, including passwords, e-mail addresses and dates of birth from 1 million user accounts.
“We are looking into these claims,” Jim Kennedy, a spokesman for Sony Pictures Entertainment, said yesterday in an e-mailed statement.
The attack may be the latest on Tokyo-based Sony, which in the past two months said more than 100 million accounts were compromised after hackers broke into its networks. Sony, which yesterday resumed full operation of the PlayStation Network in the U.S. and Europe after six weeks of suspension, said last month the intrusions will cost about 14 billion yen ($173 million) this fiscal year.
“My biggest concern is whether the expense related to unauthorized accesses will stay within 14 billion yen,” said Tsunenori Ohmaki, an analyst at Tachibana Securities Co. in Tokyo. Online businesses have become more important to Sony as its main TV unit won’t likely contribute to its earnings in the near future, he said.
LulzSec
LulzSec, which described the attack only as recent, posted customer information online from what appeared to be sweepstakes and loyalty-program databases, including one tied to the long- running soap opera “The Young and the Restless.” The group also took information from Sony music operations in Belgium and the Netherlands, it said.
“It’s just a matter of taking it,” LulzSec said in its statement. “This is disgraceful and insecure; they were asking for it.”
Sony fell 0.6 percent to close at 2,129 yen in Tokyo trading, extending its loss this year to 27 percent. The Nikkei- 225 Stock Average has lost 7.2 percent this year.
The maker of Bravia televisions and Walkman music players has been facing series of intrusions to its online entertainment services, forcing an April 20 shutdown of the Qriocity and PlayStation Network services. Sony also halted some Internet services in Canada, Thailand and Indonesia last month after detecting unauthorized accesses.
Sony Ericsson
Intruders stole the names and e-mail addresses of about 2,000 customers at Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB’s Canadian website, while a site in Thailand may have been modified to help send fraudulent e-mails, Sony said last month. The company also suspended a site in Indonesia because of a suspected attack and found Web codes for the Japanese music unit were stolen.
At Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc., hackers have stolen programming code related to artists’ sites, Yoshikazu Takahashi, a spokesman at the unit, said last month.
Tim Schaaff, president of Sony Network Entertainment International, appeared before a congressional panel yesterday to defend the company’s response to the April data breach.
Sony yesterday restored the PlayStation Network in all markets except Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea. Users of its Qriocity entertainment services will be able to download music with the resumption, while video on demand will remain suspended until further notice, it said yesterday.
Sony increased the number of firewalls between servers and added software to monitor intrusions and system vulnerabilities before resuming the services.
--With assistance from Yuki Yamaguchi in Tokyo. Editors: Anand Krishnamoorthy, Young-Sam Cho.
To contact the reporters on this story: Cliff Edwards in San Francisco at cedwards28@bloomberg.net; Mariko Yasu in Tokyo at myasu@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Young-Sam Cho at ycho2@bloomberg.net; Anthony Palazzo at apalazzo@bloomberg.net
A group of Internet hackers, which refers to itself as Lulz Security or LulzSec, has claimed to have broken into servers for Sony entertainment websites and stolen in excess of one million items of personal details, including email addresses and passwords. Seventy-five thousand "music codes" and three-and-a-half million "music coupons" were also alleged broken into, according to a statement on their website.

In a statement, LulzSec reported that, "from a single injection, we accessed EVERYTHING" ''''. Claiming that Sony had not encrypted data which they allegedly gained access to and "were asking for it", the group questioned: "Why do you put such faith in a company that allows itself to become open to these simple attacks?"  spokesperson Jim Kennedy has stated that the corporation is "looking into these claims".

This incident is reminiscent of an occasion when the data of over 77 million accounts on the  were unlawfully taken by hackers in April 2011. The thefts prompted Sony to close the network, as well as other features, for nearly one month. According to , the attack is thought to be the largest in the history of the Internet.