MSNBC speculated that the encrypted credit card information that hackers managed to get their hands on through PSN was up for sale on the Internet, or even that the hackers were trying to sell the information back to Sony. Sony are now, on the Playstation Blog, denying these rumours.
"One report indicated that a group tried to sell millions of credit card numbers back to Sony," communications chief Patrick Seybold writes. "To my knowledge there is no truth to this report of a list, or that Sony was offered an opportunity to purchase the list."
Patrick also took the time to clarify some points about the passwords. Were they encrypted or not? "While the passwords that were stored were not 'encrypted,' they were transformed using a cryptographic hash function", he said. "There is a difference between these two types of security measures which is why we said the passwords had not been encrypted. But I want to be very clear that the passwords were not stored in our database in cleartext form."