Sony Online Entertainment believes that it has lost an estimated 127,000 credit card numbers; meaning 24.6m accounts have been compromised.

The games developer has confirmed it was attacked by hackers last month and that user data has possibly been compromised. The attack took place between April 16th and 17th.

“Our ongoing investigation of illegal intrusions into Sony Online Entertainment systems has discovered that hackers may have obtained personal customer information from SOE systems,” a statement from the company reads.

“We are today advising you that the personal information you provided us in connection with your SOE account may have been stolen in a cyber-attack. Stolen information includes, to the extent you provided it to us, the following: name, address (city, state, zip, country), email address, gender, birthdate, phone number, login name and hashed password.

“Customers outside the United States should be advised that we further discovered evidence that information from an outdated database from 2007 containing approximately 12,700 non-US customer credit or debit card numbers and expiration dates (but not credit card security codes) – we will be notifying each of those customers promptly.”

The firm does believe that its main credit card database appears to be safe.

As a result of this, all SOE games have been taken offline, a security firm has been hired to investigate what happened and security is being further enhanced.

SOE also recommends that users should change their passwords to other services if they were the same as their Online account or Playstation passwords.

“Our teams are working around the clock on this, and services will be restored as soon as possible,” SOE added. “Sony takes information protection very seriously and will continue to work to ensure that additional measures are taken to protect personally identifiable information. Providing quality and secure entertainment services to our customers is our utmost priority.”