As Sony Pictures struggles to recover from one blow after another related to the devastating cyber attack, one may overlook the fact that its parent company in Japan has been a popular target of hackers for years. Three years ago, in April 2011, Sony's PlayStation network was shut down for nearly a month when hackers stole the personal information of an estimated 77 million people. That same year, in June, hackers released 150,000 Sony Pictures records including usernames and passwords and claimed to have compromised the private information of more than one million people. In October 2012, hacker group "The Three Musketeers" released a security key that allowed PS3 users to run pirated games.
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Sony in Japan has been a popular target of hackers for years
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PlayStation network was shut down in April 2011 when hackers stole information of 77M people
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Former Sony employees are suing the company for failing to protect their privacy
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Analyst says attack reveals lax cyber-security among Sony's ranks
He says the @placeholder network may be more vulnerable because of the large amount of users with varying degrees of access.