Sony Ireland hackers claim Rebecca Black and R Kelly marry

In yet another embarrassing revelation for Japanese electronics company Sony, it has emerged that one of the firm's Irish web sites has been hacked and defaced with fake news stories.

Reports emerged earlier today via Twitter that the Sony Music Ireland site was displaying some strange celebrity stories, and at the time of writing Sony was redirecting visitors to its Facebook page while it sorts out the problem.

Some of the more outrageous claims made in the stories, according to Sophos' Graham Cluley, are that two members of pop band The Script were found dead in their backstage dressing room, and that teenaged singer Rebecca Black has married R Kelly in Disneyland.

"Hackers appear to have broken into Sony Music Ireland's site and planted the bogus celebrity stories," said Cluley in a blog post.

"It's just the latest in a long line of attacks on Sony web sites, and further embarrasses the company as it tries to protect its online reputation."

Having already had its systems successfully hacked over 20 times, Sony will be hoping that this incident does not damage its reputation any further, and to be honest, it's difficult to see how that could be possible.

However, what it does show yet again is that organisations of this size need to ensure that every aspect of their IT infrastructure - from the databases containing user information, to the web servers - are secure and resilient to attack.