Sony So-net Breach Hits 2.6 Million Customers | Freewares

Sony is back in the breach headlines. Sony Network Communications confirmed on October 27 that attackers broke into the database of So-net, its Japanese internet provider, and made off with around 2.6 million customer records.

The stolen data includes names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, and customer IDs, covering So-net and its sister provider Plala. Around 54,000 email and password combinations from associated mail services were also taken. The intrusion happened on October 19. It was detected on October 23.

Four quiet days

That four-day gap is the part security people will dwell on. Attackers had most of a working week inside the database of a major ISP before anyone noticed. Whatever they took in that window was long gone by the time the alarms went off.

For customers, the exposure is worse than a typical leak. An ISP knows who you are, where you live, and how to reach you, and this one also held actual passwords for some accounts.

Why password reuse is the real danger

Those 54,000 email and password pairs are the sharp edge of this breach. Almost nobody will have their So-net password guessed; plenty of people reuse the same password elsewhere, and attackers know it. Credential stuffing, trying leaked combinations on other sites, is cheap, automated, and depressingly effective.

If you have ever used the same password in two places, this is the reminder to stop. A password manager makes one unique password per site painless, and free, open-source options like KeePass do the job without handing your vault to anyone.

What to do if you are affected

So-net customers should change their password now, change it anywhere else it was reused, and be skeptical of emails claiming to be from the provider. Everyone else gets the cheaper version of the lesson: it happened to them this time, but the list of companies that have never been breached is short and shrinking.