Sony hacked again, with over one million users' details nicked

No, you're not trapped in some kind of time loop -- Sony's had its defences breached once more. Hackers have stolen the account details of over a million punters, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses and dates of birth.

It's not the PlayStation Network that's been targeted this time, but Sony Pictures -- the silver screen arm of the Japanese tech giant. The breach was carried out by hacker group LulzSec. The group claims it had no trouble breaking into Sony's systems, using an SQL injection, a simple hacking technique.

"From a single injection, we accessed EVERYTHING," the group wrote on its website. "What's worse is that every bit of data we took wasn't encrypted. Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plain text."

Having broken in, the group released a torrent file that it claims contains 71,000 email addresses and passwords from the hack. Our business-savvy sister site ZDNet UK says it's seen this file, but can't confirm its contents.

Posting to Twitter, the group said that unencrypted admin accounts, government and military passwords had also been nicked. In the post on its website, it claimed to have nabbed admin details of Sony Pictures, 75,000 "music codes" and 3.5 million "music coupons".

"This was disgraceful and insecure: they were asking for it," said LulzSec.

Eh, we're not sure about that -- the last thing Sony wants in the wake of the catastrophic PSN hack and subsequent outage is another security breach. And customers who've had their details exposed are unlikely to thank the hackers for helpfully pointing out Sony's failure to adequately shield and encrypt user data.

What do you think? Who's to blame and how should Sony respond? Let us know in the comments section below, or fire a suggestion at our Facebook wall.