At last, Sony and all involved in running the PlayStation Network have come clean with exactly what has happened with their network.

For the past few days, all access to the Playstation Network and Qriocity services have been unavailable as they turned off the service to investigate what has happened.

3 minutes ago, the user PlayStationEU on twitter announced a link to their latest blog post (here: click!). The blog post states:

we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state/province, zip or postal code), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity passwords and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence that credit card data was taken at this time, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, to be on the safe side we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may also have been obtained.

If you have a Playstation and you’ve signed up for the Playstation Network, it may be wise for you to consider changing your password or authentication details if they are the same on other sites or networks.

This is yet another example of the importance of ensuring your passwords are not all the same for every service. If you can use a three-word-phrase instead, use a three-word-phrase. For example, the password “abc123” is nowhere near as secure as “my dog smells”.