Parts of the Sony PlayStation Network are coming back online after more than two weeks of continuous downtime.
The PlayStation Store website went online around 02:00 UTC today, although online gaming services through the PlayStation Network are still undergoing maintenance.
Sony yesterday began the final stages of testing the new PlayStation Network and Qriocity services, making sure they are secure before the services are relaunched.
Six days after the PlayStation Network was taken offline, Sony revealed that 77 million users’ names, addresses, email addresses, birth dates, logins and passwords had been compromised by hackers. Although the passwords were transformed with a cryptographic hashing function, weak passwords may nonetheless be vulnerable to offline brute-force attacks. Accordingly, Sony recommended that users change their passwords if they use the same credentials for other, unrelated services.
Although credit card details were stored in an encrypted format, these could also be at risk if the decryption key was stored on, or made available to, any of the compromised servers. However, as of Wednesday, the major credit card companies have not reported any fraudulent transactions resulting directly from the Sony security breach.