If the breach is as extensive as LulzSec has claimed, it would be the second major compromise that Sony has suffered since mid-April, when intruders broke into its .

Those breaches resulted in the compromise of personal data belonging to nearly 100 million account holders.

Since then, there have been a at various .

The attacks, such as the one carried out against Sony Pictures by LulzSec, have been designed largely to embarrass Sony, which has sparked the wrath of many hackers for its hard line stance over copyright and IP protection.

The continuing attacks have become a huge issue for the company. Sony was forced to shut down its PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment networks for several days to fix issues resulting from those intrusions. Even now the networks are .