Sony (NYSE: SNE) said Tuesday that it had detected a large-scale attempt to hack into gaming and entertainment customers' accounts using log-in data stolen from other sources, and it temporarily shut down 93,000 accounts. As industry observers noted, the company appears better prepared for attacks than it did earlier this year when it was the victim of a massive hack.

The hacking attempts revealed this week seemed to involve sign-in ID and password information stolen from other companies, websites or other sources, said Philip Reitinger, Sony Group's chief information security officer. The hackers managed to get brief access to 60,000 PlayStation and Sony Entertainment Network accounts and 33,000 accounts on Sony Online Entertainment, but no credit card data was at risk, Reitinger wrote on the company blog.

Earlier this year, Sony's PlayStation Network was shut down for about a month following a series of massive cyber attacks that exposed millions of customers' personal data.

The attack announced this week is the first that Reitinger has had to address publicly, notes Mike Lennon at SecurityWeek. Previously at the Department of Homeland Security, Reitinger was hired by Sony following the attacks earlier this year.

"In defense of Sony and Reitinger, this is one type of attack that many organizations are likely unprepared to defend against," Lennon writes. "But as many SIEM and DB security vendors will surely mention today, 'We've got a solution for that!'"

Whether this most recent attack on Sony merits the term "hack" became a subject of debate in the blogosphere. Matt Peckham at Computerworld noted that in a true hack attackers gain access to data in the system, but here they just got fleeting access to a relative small number of accounts' "purchase power."

"Had Sony been truly hacked, we'd be talking about another dismaying flaw in their cybersecurity setup. Instead, we're talking about the fallout from a prior attack, in which hackers seized and reportedly released Sony user account-related information," Peckham writes.

For more, see:
- Philip Reitinger's post at the PlayStation blog
- Mike Lennon's post at SecurityWeek
- Matt Peckham's post at Computerworld

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