Sorry if already posted 

""The Information Commissioner's Office takes data protection breaches extremely seriously," the organisation told Eurogamer this morning.

"Any business or organisation that is processing personal information in the UK must ensure they comply with the law, including the need to keep data secure.

"We have recently been informed of an incident which appears to involve Sony. We are contacting Sony and will be making further enquiries to establish the precise nature of the incident before deciding what action, if any, needs to be taken by this office."

Sony is facing accusations that it should have alerted its customers to the possibility that their credit card information had been stolen earlier than yesterday. Security codes have not been taken.

Sony is encouraging customers to check their credit card statements and be on the look out for scam emails and letters.

But questions have this morning arisen over the steps Sony took to protect our information.

The fact that user passwords have been "obtained", as Sony puts it, suggests Sony stored user passwords as plain text – and did not encrypt them."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-04-27-ico-confirms-it-will-quiz-sony-over-psn 

You don't actually need the security code to make payments online in a lot of circumstances.

in a lot not all.  but regardless i thought i read somewhere that you can store you security code on psn as well. so wouldn't they also then have that?  of course cancelling and getting new credit card is easy enough, not so much name/address/date of birth

you know the whole identity theft stuff.  regardless if this affects many or not.  its going to hurt sony's rep.  i mean hell how are we going to even know.  think of the news and how they attribute all violence done by young kids due to video games.

now lets look at how many people are affected by identity theft each year.  how many of them do you think might have had a psn account?  So how are we supposed to know if that theft was caused by psn or not?  its impossible to know unless you capture teh theifs and ask them.   just looking quick i see in 2009, some 11 million people were affected by ID theft.  Now imagine this year.  Could be the same number, but how easy is it for hundreds of those people to BLAME SONY.