User blog:N7/Microsoft warns of Modern Warfare 2 phishing scams

The credit card details of 77 million Playstation users may have been stolen during one of the largest ever internet attacks in history, Sony admitted today.

Sony suffered a massive attack last week saying hackers obtained 'usernames, passwords, logins, security questions and potentially credit card numbers. This hacking attack could cost Sony billions.

Sony said it learned of the hack on April 19th, prompting them to shut down the network immediately.

A spokesman said it took "several days of forensic investigation" after learning of the breach before the company knew consumers' data had been compromised making a furious user reply on Sony's blog with, "If you have compromised my credit information, you will never receive it again. The fact that you've waited this long to divulge this information to your customers is deplorable. Shame on you."

The finger of suspicion has been pointed toward Anonymous, but the group, which also has connections to WikiLeaks, has said it had nothing to do with the intrusion.

In a statement on its website, Anonymous said: "For once we didn't do it."

Users then went on to accuse Sony of taking advantage of Anonymous previous ill-will towards the company to distract users from the fact that the outage is actually an internal problem with the company's servers'.

PCWorld's Keir Thomas has pointed out that the phrasing Sony used - talking of an "external intrusion" - indicated that the attack wasn't a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which is one of Anonymous's most popular weapons.

He wrote: "Instead, this seems to be an individual breaking into the network and this is probably why it's taking so long to clean-up - Sony has to trace every corner of their systems affected by the hacker and repair it or restore files."

It is unkown when Playstation Network will be up and running again.