Of the 77 million PlayStation accounts that were compromised from Sony's PlayStation Network last week, roughly 600,000 of those belong to Australian gamers. That's 65 percent of the 1.15 million Australian PlayStation3 owners who are registered on the network that are now at considerable risk of identity or credit card theft, security experts are warning.
The Sydney Morning Herald and the Herald Sun were quick to gather the thoughts of security experts following Sony's recent admission that hackers were able to break through their online network and download confidential information of registered users including their user names, passwords, addresses, birth dates, and possibly credit card details. The experts are warning that there is enough private information for considerable acts of identity theft and fraud, and paint a frightening picture of what could happen if your personal information lands in the hands of the wrong kind of people...
From SMH.com.au....
The head of the police fraud squad, Detective Superintendent Col Dyson, said, ''If you're armed with enough personal information, you could basically do anything that the legitimate person could do.'
'Personal or financial information is a valuable commodity and generally these days we find organised groups harvesting information and then selling it to other groups to use.'
Online security expert, Geordie Guy, describes some of the possibilities of what criminals can do with the private information to the Herald Sun...
"This is the sort of information people can use to apply for a (fake) driver's licence or buy a couch interest-free from Harvey Norman....
Huge pools of data like this are going to have enormous appeal to crooks on the black market"
A former privacy commissioner, Malcolm Crompton, has given some blunt advise to those who may be affected from the security breach...
Anybody who has given their details to PlayStation should be in touch with their bank pretty damn quickly
It's begun...
An Adelaide PlayStation user whose private details were held by the Sony Corporation has had $2,000 of unauthorised charges run up on his credit card in recent days.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/28/3202046.htm?section=enter…