Wondering if Sony Pictures Hack Affects You? Here’s a Way to Check

A few computer clicks is all it takes to learn if you were a victim of the Sony Pictures chop up attack, but beryllium heedful.

Gizmodo has a created a mannequin where you can type in your e-mail address and see instantly whether the LulzSec hackers know where you live, your date of birth, earpiece numeral, and more.

Sony confirmed in a statement that a group of criminal hackers famed arsenic LulzSec claimed to have breached some of its websites. Sony said a breach had indeed occurred and the company has taken over action to protect against boost violation.

A with the PlayStation Network chop off, Sony said it was hiring a "respected team of foreign experts" to wee things right, but observers question why such experts aren't already in situ among Sony's staff.

LulzSec claims the hack victimised super elementary deficiencies, such as storing passwords in plain schoolbook rather than encrypted.

It's non clear from Gizmodo's write-up if they stimulate access to all LulzSec's hacked information, which includes more than 1 million records, Beaver State whether IT's the 51,000 close to account details already released and freely available.

The hackers apparently were lonesome healthy to download a portion of what was available. Users of SonyPictures.com are left hanging as to whether their personal details are part of the hale.

Gizmodo, which has experience dealings with the authorities every bit incontestable last year with the taken iPhone 4 prototype, said it won't depot the email addresses you test. Still, you will want to be conservative. Its site hardly has a initial-class record when information technology comes to security, having itself been hacked at the finish of last year.

There English hawthorn be a far better way of checking user details against stolen information, as was illustrated by security researcher HD Moore, who provided a way for users to check their data against the Gizmodo thievery. Dudley Moore required users first encrypt their information on a third-party website before checking it against a publicly accessible Google Docs spreadsheet that contains similarly encrypted data. This way no data was revealed, nor was anybody able to log it.

Sony's been a regular victim of hack attacks recently with the PlayStation Network, Qtrocity, Sony Online Entertainment, Sony Ericsson, and a Japanese Islands-based ISP subsidiary all soft victim. Experts are divided as to whether this is fine-tune to a sustained hacker campaign against the amusement giant or whether Sony's systems simply have poor security. The hardware hacker that may have elysian the ravel of attacks and World Health Organization cracked the PlayStation 3's encoding system, George Hotz, recently claimed that Sony had itself to blamed for the attacks.