Sony hacked again after phishing site found

Sony has had its IT systems breached again, after hackers broke in to one of the firm's servers and ran a phishing site on its Thai domain, according to security researchers.

Experts at Finnish security firm F-Secure revealed the hack in a blog post on Friday, although they were at pains to point out that the incident had nothing to do with the major breach of Sony's systems in April which may have exposed the personal details of up to 100 million customers.

The phishing site, running under hdworld.sony.co.th, has been designed to spoof an Italian credit card company, Carta Si.

"We know you're not supposed to kick somebody when they're already down ... but we just found a live phishing site running on one of Sony's servers," wrote F-Secure chief research officer Mikko Hyppönen.

"Basically this means that Sony has been hacked again, although in this case the server is probably not very important. Sony has been notified."

The incident comes at a difficult time for Sony, which is still struggling to cope with the fallout from one of the biggest hacks of all time.

Phishing incidents are on the rise, thanks to the continued prevalence of automated toolkits on the underground online market, according to the latest State of Spam report from security firm Symantec.

The report also found that the "overall phishing landscape" increased by over 15 per cent in April, while phishing sites created by automated toolkits grew by about 26 per cent.