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TOKYO (AFP) – The United States, Britain, state and Hong Kong are work the hacking and thieving of individualized accumulation from Sony's PlayStation Network, which has 77 meg users worldwide.

The PlayStation Network and Qriocity streaming penalization service were shut downbound on Apr 20 after what Sony described as an "external intrusion" and remain offline as the consort upgrades section and works with agent investigators.

A US House of Representatives commission Friday dispatched a honor to Sony chair Kazuo Hirai with questions on the accumulation breach.

"Sony's grounds describes aggregation illicitly obtained to include statement aggregation as well as potentially strikingness information," said the honor from a commission of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which was posted on the Internet.

"Given the amount and nature of individualized aggregation known to impact been taken, the potential harm that could be caused if assign bill aggregation was also condemned would be quite significant."

The committee, which has regular a chance on May 4 to discuss accumulation thieving issues, also asked Sony to explain why it believes assign bill aggregation was not condemned despite existence unable to determine the literal scale of the theft.

The Asian electronics colossus has said users' assign bill accumulation was encrypted but could not conception discover the existence that bill accumulation was obtained by hackers.

In Britain, the Information Commissioner's Office said it had contacted Sony and will attain "further enquiries to found the precise nature of the incident before deciding what action, if any, needs to be taken."

Australia's Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim also said he had launched an investigation.

"We're seeing more and more now aggregation existence held globally, and it's more incumbent upon organisations to attain trusty they do impact brawny section systems in place to protect that information," he told journalist ABC early this week.

Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner Allan Chiang said he was probing the severance and met with local Sony official Katsuhiko Murase who told him 400,000 Hong Kong PlayStation Network individual accounts were involved.

He said Murase told him the statement aggregation compromised includes the name, address, country, email address, birthdate, PSN password and login, and PSN online ID of users but there was no grounds that assign bill accumulation was taken.

Sony is existence sued in a US suite by gamers who impact accused the consort of existence neglectful and breaching its contracts with PlayStation Network users.

The consort has not indicated whether it has identified a offender in the intrusion.

Internet vigilante assemble Anonymous had vowed retaliation against Sony for attractive jural state against hackers who unsmooth PS3 defences to change housing operative software.

Sony has sold about 48 meg PS3 consoles worldwide since they impact the mart in Nov of 2006.

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