Incorrect. This is a serious breech.

The credit card information retrieved will only be somewhat useful, but the personal information that was pulled from Sony is a goldmine for criminals.

With a full name, address, and birthdate (all in the Sony data), you can sign up for MANY credit cards online in a very short period of time. Many companies even allow you to request credit without a social insurance number. Savvy fraudsters / organized crime can do this and then retrieve the cards from your mailbox.

I don’t have a tin foil hat: I personally experienced this and it was a nightmare.

This all flew under my radar as the cards and statements were pulled from my mailbox multiple times. I only found out what happened after the criminal detected that I my credit was maxxed out and then allowed the statements to hit my mailbox.

Sure, I wasn’t assigned any of the debt, but the amount of time spent on retrieving credit reports and calling credit card companies was immensely time consuming. 10 hours on the phone the first day, and eight months of further clean up. Not only that, but I now have to permanently maintain an alert notification on my credit file because my information was likely injected into a database with a countdown to indicate when my credit will be ripe again.

Had I been looking to finance a house or car, I would have been screwed to the nth degree.

Your advice not to panic is correct to the degree that PSN users should approach this with a cool head. However, users should swiftly move to protect themselves:
- Retrieve your credit report immediately
- Any unknown or suspicious credit requests should be listed with a phone number of the credit lender. Call these numbers and find out what happened
- Apply an alert notification against your credit record. This should be a free service from the credit bureaus, but may take some time to apply. Makes acquiring credit in the future a bit of a hassle, but less so than dealing with serious fraud clean up activities.