As part of its revised earnings projections published today, Sony said it estimates the PlayStation Network attack from April will cost the company 14 billion yen, or $171 million.

This estimated cost includes the personal information theft protection program for customers, the "Welcome Back" program, customer support, network security enhancement, legal experts, and the impact on profits due to a possible future revenue decrease."So far, we have not received any confirmed reports of customer identity theft issues, nor confirmed any misuse of credit cards from the cyber-attack," the company said. "Those are key variables, and if that changes, the costs could change."In addition, in connection with the data breach, class action lawsuits have been filed against Sony and certain of its subsidiaries and regulatory inquiries have begun; however, those are all at a preliminary stage, so we are not able to include the possible outcome of any of them in our results forecast for the fiscal year."The costs will be incurred during Sony's current fiscal year, which ends on March 31, 2012. The company will report results for fiscal year 2011 this Thursday.