Sony's security issues seem to be getting worse rather than better. After a still-unidentified hacker busted into PSN, taking the service down and stealing a whole slew of user data in the process, it now appears that Sony Online Entertainment was hit as well.

SOE is a multiplayer online game service, and it was taken down today with a message that said that they took it down because "in the course of our investigation into the intrusion into our systems we have discovered an issue that warrants enough concern for us to take the service down effective immediately." They later updated to say that the hackers may have obtained "customer names, addresses, e-mail addresses, gender, birth dates, phone numbers, log-in names, and hashed passwords."

Is there's a silver lining to this whole thing, it's that companies are probably going to start taking data protection a whole lot more seriously. This is not going to be a cheap problem for Sony to fix, reputation or money-wise.

Via CNET