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Sony: Blame hack attack for PlayStation outage

Sony said on Monday that unidentified hackers are to blame for a PlayStation Network outage that led to the system being taken offline five days ago.

About 70 million people are registered members of the network, which is the online service for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles. It allows people who own either device to play cyber games together as well as to download myriad content, including games, music and movies. In a blog post, the company was unable to estimate when the network would be back.

"Our efforts to resolve this matter involve re-building our system to further strengthen our network infrastructure," Sony said in a statement. "Though this task is time-consuming, we decided it was worth the time necessary to provide the system with additional security."

At this point, Sony says has not yet determined whether any personal information or credit card data of its users was compromised.

When the outage first occurred, the hacker group Anonymous came under suspicion because earlier in the month a post speaking on behalf of the group declared "Operation: Sony," aiming Denial of Service attacks at the PlayStation Network. Since then, however, Anonymous declared a cease-fire and also denied any culpability in a Facebook post.

Last week, when the service first became unavailable to users, Sony said it might "be a full day or two before we're able to get the service completely back up and running." In its update, Sony did not provide an estimate when it thought service might return to normal.

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