Sony, Playstation | featured news

Sony said on Monday its new handheld game device would be called PlayStation Vita. The company added that it would partner with AT&T as exclusive carrier for the 3G version of the device in the United States.

Sony on Tuesday reported another security breach, saying 8,500 user accounts had been compromised. The company said that Sony Music Entertainment Greece learned about the data breach late Sunday. It affected artist websites where fans can sign up for newsletters.

Sony is expecting an annual loss of $3.2 billion, reversing its earlier projection of a return to profit, as the electronics giant struggles with production disruptions from Japan's tsunami and a hacker attack on its online gaming service.

Sony Corp is considering resuming its U.S.-based online games service on Tuesday, following a massive security breach last month, Kyodo news agency said on Friday.

Several gaming news outlets are reporting that Sony’s PlayStation Network password reset system has a weakness that makes it vulnerable to hackers.

For three pennies an hour, hackers can rent Amazon.com Inc.’s servers to wage cyber attacks such as the one that crippled Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Network and led to the second-largest online data breach in U.S. history. A hacker used Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud, or EC2, service to attack Sony’s online entertainment systems last month, a person with knowledge of the matter said May 13. The intruder, who used a bogus name to set up an account that’s now disabled, didn’t hack into Amazon’s servers, the person said.

Sony plans to start a gradual restoration of its PlayStation services Sunday as the company works to resume normal operations following a security breach that exposed personal details of 77 million users.

Sony said on Saturday it had removed off the Internet the personal details of 2,500 people that had been stolen by hackers and posted on a website.

Sony is reportedly attempting to avoid testifying before Congress later this week, after the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade asked the company to answer questions regarding its failure to protect the PlayStation Network from hackers. The memo distributed to subcommittee members suggests the hearing is designed to explore "risks related to data breaches" and data security practices utilized by the industry.

Sony Corp. said Monday that hackers may have taken personal information from an additional 24.6 million user accounts after a review of the recent PlayStation Network breach found an intrusion at a division that makes multiplayer online games. The data breach comes on top of the 77 million PlayStation accounts it has already said were jeopardized by a malicious intrusion.