Despite my rather dramatic excerpt above, I have to confirm that nobody died during the PSN hack attempt, disclosed by Sony via their Playstation blogs earlier this morning.
"Less than one tenth of one percent (0.1%) of our PSN, SEN and SOE audience may have been affected," the post says. "There were approximately 93,000 accounts globally (PSN/SEN: approximately 60,000 accounts; SOE: approximately 33,000) where the attempts succeeded in verifying those accounts’ valid sign-in IDs and passwords, and we have temporarily locked these accounts. Only a small fraction of these 93,000 accounts showed additional activity prior to being locked. We are currently reviewing those accounts for unauthorized access, and will provide more updates as we have them. Please note, if you have a credit card associated with your account, your credit card number is not at risk. We will work with any users whom we confirm have had unauthorized purchases made to restore amounts in the PSN/SEN or SOE wallet."
It seems as if these account details came from a source outside of Sony, with many of the attempts to get into an account resulting in failure. Either way, Sony saw the unauthorised access much more quickly this time and moved in to sort out the issue. Despite this fact, there's already at least one request for free games in the comments on the blog post, a request that I'm not sure is ironic.