Sony told customers that it is moving closer to restoring services to its beleaguered Playstation Network, saying earlier this week that it would take be a few days, but so after a week the network is still offline.

The latest indication comes from a note Sony put out late this week to its customers in Japan.

On a Japanese corporate message board, the company said it was sorry indeed for the continued failure of its gaming network, but said it would also restore service one a piece by piece basis.

As we said the other day regarding the future of the service and its restart, restoration will be conducted in stages on a regional basis to ensure the safety of our customers, the company said.

It went on to say, We are preparing to be able to resume service as soon as possible in Japan, and are now entering the verification stage for ensuring the safety and security of the network.

The statement seems to say that it will restore service by region, and that Japan would be first. Representatives did not respond to requests for clarification.

The rest of the announcement went on to explain that it was moving through its restoration process.

We preparing to resume the service as soon as possible in Japan are now doing the verification stage to ensure the safety and security, Sony said.

Sony is migrating files to new servers that facilitate early detection of cyber-attacks and secure data management.

For those of you committed to safety, but waited for some time now, humbly we thank you for understanding, the note read.

For weeks Sony has been in the crosshairs on digital vigilantes, forcing the company to shut down several services and issue public apologies and reparations to customers affected.

In April Sony was forced to take down the massive Playstation gaming network after attackers infiltrated and acquired personal data on nearly 80 million customers -- one of the largest security breaches in history.

Then, on May 9, Sony learned SOE, which runs games such as DC Universe Online, had also been attacked, affecting an additional 24 million accounts.

The origins spur from a lawsuit brought against a hardware hacker George Hotz, who for months have been posting exploits of the Playstation 3 system onto his personal website. In perusing Hotz and those who gained access to his information, Sony teamed with Internet Service Providers, Paypal and even YouTube to gain access to the IP addresses of users who viewed the content.

That move became a rallying cry for hackers to organize and take aim at the Japanese giant, decrying what it saw to be gross violations of digital privacy.

One group, calling it self Anonymous, said that the move was just the beginning and that it would not forgive the company for its privacy invasion.

Where the judicial system has failed, Anonymous will persevere, by standing up for the rights of everyone, not just those who dared to challenge these corporations, the group said on April 14, calling its members to action.

It went on to launch several denial of service attacks to Sony properties, flooding its servers with requests in attempts to overload them, before moving on to what it says would be other ways of getting Sony's attention.

It has roundly denied the more serious data-breaches that involved the loss of personal data and nearly 10 million credit cards, but Sony is saying its investigations point the finger squarely at the group.

When Sony Online Entertainment discovered this past Sunday afternoon that data from its servers had been stolen, it also discovered that the intruders had planted a file on one of those servers named 'Anonymous' with the words 'We are Legion,' Sony wrote in a letter to Congress.

The group insists it was the result of someone seeking to frame them, but new reports suggest that while the attack may not have been centrally planned, other members of the group may have acted on their own whim, infiltrating and stealing the data.

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